Homemade mince pies, planned: mincemeat on Stir-up Sunday, pastry in rounds, a freezer full by December

The short version

• At 25 g of mincemeat per pie, the amount that fills a standard 12-hole bun tin, a 1.5 kg pot of homemade mincemeat makes 60 pies. Most families need 36 to 48 between early December and New Year.
• Shortcrust for 12 lidded pies takes 300 g of plain flour and 150 g of cold fat. Scale by the tin, not by the person: one batch of pastry, one tin, one oven load.
• Raw pies freeze well for up to three months: open-freeze them in the tin, unglazed, then pop them out into bags. They bake from frozen with about five extra minutes.
• Baked pies keep up to a week in an airtight tin, or up to three months frozen, according to Nigella Lawson’s own storage advice; she reheats them at 120°C for 3 to 4 minutes after an hour’s thaw.
• Stir-up Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent, falls on 22 November in 2026. That is five weeks before Christmas Day: enough time for the fruit in your mincemeat to drink up the brandy.

Count the pies before you buy a single currant

Nobody bakes too few mince pies on purpose. It happens because the pies get counted for Christmas Day and then quietly disappear over the three weeks before it: the neighbour who drops off a card, the carol service that asks for a plate, the office do, the plate of something you were meant to take to the school fair. So before choosing a recipe, count the occasions, not the guests.

Our Christmas dinner timings plan for the 25th allows two pies per person across the day. Everything else on the list below is December traffic. If your house is quieter, take the bottom line down to 24; if your family treats the mince pie tin like a revolving door, take it up to 60 and make the full pot of mincemeat.

Homemade mincemeat: the recipe and why it goes in on 22 November

Mincemeat once really did contain meat, usually lamb or mutton minced with suet, dried fruit and spice. The meat dropped out over the nineteenth century; the suet, the fruit and the spice stayed. That history is why the name still confuses visitors, and why the suet question matters (more on that below).

Our pot makes about 1.5 kg, which is three 1 lb jars with a little over. Finely chop 1 large Bramley apple (about 250 g once peeled and cored) and put it in a big ovenproof bowl with 200 g raisins, 200 g sultanas, 150 g currants, 100 g chopped mixed peel, 50 g chopped almonds, 150 g shredded suet (beef or vegetable), 200 g dark muscovado sugar, the zest and juice of an orange and a lemon, 2 teaspoons of mixed spice, half a teaspoon of cinnamon and a good grating of nutmeg. Stir, cover with a cloth and leave it overnight so the sugar starts pulling juice out of the apple.

Raw apple is what makes homemade mincemeat ferment in the jar. The way round it, popularised by Delia Smith, is to put the covered bowl into a very low oven, around 110 to 120°C, for three hours. The suet melts and coats every piece of fruit, and as the mix cools and you stir it every so often, the fat sets around it. When it is completely cold, stir in 100 ml of brandy and pack it into sterilised jars with waxed discs and tight lids. Kept somewhere cool and dark, it will be well past ready by the time you make pastry, and once a jar is open it goes in the fridge.

Why Stir-up Sunday? The name comes from the collect read in Anglican churches on the last Sunday before Advent, which opens with “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord”, and it is traditionally the day the Christmas pudding gets made so it can mature. If you are making a pudding anyway, the same afternoon and the same dried fruit order cover the mincemeat. Five weeks is long enough for the brandy to soak in and short enough that you never have to wonder whether last year’s jar is still good.

Mince pie pastry, and why the tins decide everything

The pastry is a plain shortcrust with a little sugar: 300 g of plain flour, a pinch of salt, 150 g of cold fat cut into cubes (all butter, or half butter and half lard for the flakier, more old-fashioned crust), 2 tablespoons of icing sugar, then 1 egg yolk mixed with 2 to 3 tablespoons of ice-cold water to bring it together. A food processor does it in under a minute. Wrap it flat, not as a ball, and give it 30 minutes in the fridge so it rolls without cracking.

Roll it to about 3 mm, cut 12 bases with a 7.5 cm fluted cutter and 12 lids or stars with a 6 cm one, press the bases into a greased 12-hole bun tin, add a level dessertspoon of mincemeat (about 25 g), wet the edges and press the lids on. Stars do not need sealing, which saves a minute per tray and lets the filling bubble up prettily.

The planning point most recipes skip is this one. Raw pies freeze best in the tin they will bake in, so they keep their shape, and you need about two hours of open freezing before they are solid enough to pop out and bag. Your bun tins are therefore the bottleneck of the whole morning, not your hands and not the oven. With two tins you can make 24 pies, freeze them, and assemble the next 24 after lunch. With four, you can do all 48 in one go if the freezer has room for four flat tins. Count your tins, and clear a freezer drawer, before you make any pastry.

Freeze raw or freeze baked?

Both work, and we do some of each. Raw pies give you a just-baked pie every time, with a crisp base and the kitchen smelling of spice, which is the whole point when people are standing in the hall with their coats on. Baked pies are faster on the day and better for taking somewhere, because they travel cold and need nothing more than a few minutes of warmth. The one thing that does not work is glazing before freezing: the egg goes patchy. Glaze at the last moment, straight onto the frozen pastry.

Your freezer should be at around minus 18°C, which is the figure the Food Standards Agency gives, and both kinds of pie are best eaten within about three months. In practice they never last that long.

Oven times: fresh, from frozen and reheated

Freshly made pies go in at 200°C (180°C fan, gas 6) for 18 to 20 minutes, until the crust has turned a deep gold and the filling has started to bubble round the rims. From frozen, keep the same temperature and allow 23 to 25 minutes. Give them five minutes to settle in the tin before you lift them out, because the filling is close to molten and the bases are fragile while they are hot.

To warm pies that were baked earlier, thaw them for an hour if they were frozen, then give them a few minutes in a low oven: Nigella Lawson suggests 120°C for 3 to 4 minutes. We avoid the microwave. It makes the pastry soft and heats the sugary filling much faster than the crust around it, so the first bite is the one that burns.

Dust with icing sugar only once they are on the plate. Done earlier, it melts into the warm pastry and vanishes.

The December calendar for 2026

The shopping list for 48 pies and a pot of mincemeat

For the mincemeat, which you buy in mid-November: 1 large Bramley apple, 200 g raisins, 200 g sultanas, 150 g currants, 100 g chopped mixed peel, 50 g almonds, 150 g shredded beef or vegetable suet, 200 g dark muscovado sugar, 1 orange, 1 lemon, mixed spice, cinnamon, a whole nutmeg and a small bottle of brandy (you need 100 ml). Three 1 lb jars, or the equivalent.

For the pastry, bought the week of 5 December: a 1.5 kg bag of plain flour, three 250 g blocks of butter (or two of butter and one of lard), a box of six eggs (four yolks for the pastry and the rest for glazing), icing sugar, and freezer bags with a marker pen. If you only have one bun tin, a second one costs less than the time you lose waiting for the first to come out of the freezer.

Vegetarian and vegan mince pies

Are mince pies vegetarian? It depends entirely on the suet. Traditional shredded suet is beef fat, so pies made with it are not vegetarian, whereas vegetable suet works in exactly the same way in the recipe above. Check the packet if you buy either, and check the pastry too, because plenty of old family shortcrust recipes use lard.

For a vegan batch, use vegetable suet in the mincemeat, a plant-based baking block in place of the butter, a splash more cold water instead of the egg yolk, and brush the tops with plant milk. The pastry is a little shorter and more crumbly, so roll it slightly thicker and chill the assembled tins for 15 minutes before they go in. If someone in your house is planning to try Veganuary, these are also the last pies of the year they can still eat in January.

How to plan your mince pie batch in Olivi

If the family recipe lives on a stained index card, scan the paper recipe and Olivi turns it into a proper recipe with ingredients and steps; if it lives on a website, import it from the link. Put the mincemeat recipe on Sunday 22 November and the pastry on Saturday 5 December by moving each recipe to its day in the plan. Set the pastry recipe to 48 servings instead of 12 and every quantity follows, so you are not doing four-times-table arithmetic with floury hands. With the region set to the United Kingdom, it all stays in grams and °C.

The shopping list is built from those two recipes and sorted by aisle, so the dried fruit, the suet and the baking things end up together. Share it with whoever is passing the shops and you see each item ticked off live, even if they have never installed the app. The pastry morning works well as a batch cooking session, with the pastry resting while you sterilise jars or line tins, and cooking mode keeps the oven timer on screen when the first tray goes in on Christmas Eve.

Planning the 25th itself is a different job, and our Christmas dinner timings cover it hour by hour. For the American side of the holiday baking, cookie exchange and all, see Christmas cookie baking.