Festive Mini Mince Pie Pastries

Remove both pastry sheets from the fridge about 15 minutes before use. Heat oven to 200 C/180 C fan/gas mark 6. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Dump the mincemeat into a bowl and grate in the orange zest and stir in the additional dried fruit. Set aside.

Unroll the shortcrust pastry sheet keeping it on its wrapper. Use a rolling pin and roll it out a little more thinly.

Using a 5 cm cutter, stamp out rounds for the base of each pie. Leave the rounds on their wrapper. Remove the scraps of dough and set them aside.

Spoon a good teaspoon-full of the mincemeat onto each round, heaping it on in a dome, but making sure to leave the base clear around the edge.

Unroll the puff pastry and roll it out quite thinly (needs to be bigger than the shortcrust as you are going to be stamping out larger rounds to cover the filling).

Using a 5.5 cm cutter, stamp out slightly larger rounds making sure that you get an equal number to the number of bases.

Pick up a circle of puff pastry and using your index finger, dip it into the beaten egg and brush around the edges of the puff pastry round. Place it on top of the mince topped shortcrust rounds and shape around the filling. Carry on doing this until all the bases are covered.

Then, tear off a bit of parchment paper and place one of the pastries on top of it. Use the paper to swivel it around as you crimp the edges quite firmly with a fork, to seal together the top and bottom crusts.

Place the pies onto the prepared trays; you can place them quite snugly as they don’t spread too much. Egg wash each of them using a brush.

Bake for 18-20 minutes, turning trays around and swapping them if necessary after 9 minutes, until golden and crisp.

While the pastries are baking, mix the icing sugar and cinnamon in a bowl.

At this point, you can re-roll the pastry trimmings and stamp out, fill, top, crimp and egg wash additional pies as detailed above, and bake when the oven is free.

Once pastries are out of the oven and still hot, use a fine meshed sieve to heavily dredge them with the cinnamon icing sugar. Remove them from the pans to a wire rack to cool.

Pack into airtight tins and sift in some more of the icing sugar until ready to serve.

Adapted from BBC Good Food Sugar Dusted Mince Pie Parcels.