Christmas "mince" pies are fruit mince not healthy at all. I love them and my Dad makes great ones, often as tarts not pies. fruit mince is dried fruit and grated apple cooked with butter and sugar and spices then soaked in brandy and left for 2 months to "mature".

When recooked in the pie shells it becomes sticky gooey magic toffee. I have an appointment with Dad for Friday to do the baking part. We'll eat them at all Christmas and new year get togethers, so many are "needed"

Kev yours look great! It's nice that you have reinstated the tradition, I've been looking at coconut oil sweet biscuit recipes too, nice to know they work.

I can't eat them being lactose intolerant, but buy a few in for others to enjoy. I will have dried fruits instead. Love that cooking them can be a family tradition Heather. Very good photos Kevin, makes my  mouth water just looking at them.

We had to hunt around for vegan acceptable ingredients.  Roberstson's Classic mincemeat is actually butter free, it does use vegetable suet. There has been a growing market in the UK for vegetarian/vegan produce which is where we had the mincemeat imported from. All American product had something unacceptable to Deb. While Heather is right that some mincemeats are traditionally fed with Brandy this is not. But the sugar content is so high it would surprise me if it self ferments:) As far as I can tell the crust and mince have nothing that would trigger lactose intolerance.

They taste as god as the ones mother used to make, but do have an after taste of coconut.

Look for refined coconut oil Dad says it's the same as Copha that we used for chocolate crackles and white christmas when I was a kid (did you have them in the UK and US?) the extra refining removes most of the coconut flavour.  So long as your recipe uses melted coconut oil it should work. it's too solid at room temperature to be worked like butter.

Dad made a very nice vegan christmas pudding for the vegans at our table this year. It used aquafarba and refined coconut oil to replace egg and butter. Not the same texture as "our" pudding, but if you hadn't been told you wouldn't have known. He found the recipe on the web

Wayne could eat fruit mince pies till the cows came home!

Kev, they look great!

I'm not sure if it's because we didn't have a lot of money growing up, or that mum wasn't a cook, but we didn't have anything flash at Christmas.  Except for trifle. Loved trifle and pav at Christmas!

💚👑

Wow, brings back childhood memories of when my mom used to make exactly the same thing. Cleaning out our freezer a week ago, Lesley came across some of these she had made a few years ago. They are now gone. Thanks for the memories.