I had a change of plan today. I had intended to try my hand at Hot Cross Buns, but found that I didn’t have enough strong white flour(bread flour) for the recipe. So I will have to make the buns after my next shopping expedition. Instead it gave me the opportunity to use up the remaining mincemeat that I made before Christmas.
I found a very simple recipe on the Aldi website . Now I guess, since Aldi is a supermarket, that they expect you to buy the mincemeat, but home-made is much better than most that you can buy, so using up the remainder of mine fitted in quite well.
This recipe is very simple and works quite well. I wasn’t happy with the cooking time though, since I decided that the centres of the cookies were not cooked through. So I increased the cooking time, by a full 8 minutes. It may be because I cooked at 200c Fan, rather than 220c convection. But the results have turned out very well indeed. They are nice and crunchy on the outside with a softer, chewy centre and, of course, that lovely mincemeat flavour. The recipe said it made 30, but I actually managed 36.
Ingredients:
- 200g unsalted butter
- Pinch of salt
- 2 egg yolks
- 411g mincemeat
- 300g caster sugar
- 125g crushed cashew nuts(or almonds, which I used)
- 400g plain flour
- Pre-heat the oven to 180°C/400°F/ gas mark 4.
- Cream the butter with the caster sugar.
- Beat in the egg yolks until well blended.
- Sieve the flour into the mixture along with a pinch of salt and mix well.
- Add the mincemeat and the crushed cashew nuts (crush with a rolling pin) and mix well.
- Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a greased baking tray and bake for 10 minutes until light brown.