Christmas leftover Recipes 2: Mincemeat muffins

The thing I often have left over at Christmas is a jar of mincemeat, or more annoyingly ½ a jar! So what better way to make good use of it than making some muffins! You’ll be very popular if you present these at work(although all my work colleagues seem to be dieting!), or when visiting friends, and they don’t taste TOO Christmassy.  The great thing about this recipe is that its very quick and very easy to make, plus the ingredients are all store cupboard staples. This makes 12 small cakes, but can easily be doubled(or trebled!).

Ingredients

120g (5oz)  Self raising flour

¼ tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1 large egg

50g (2oz) butter (melted and slightly cooled)

40g (1 ½ oz) Caster sugar

75ml (3 fl oz) milk

Approx 175g (6 ½ oz) Mincemeat

Method

1.Preheat the oven to 200°C (gas mark 6, 400°F), To start, sift (If you can be bothered, I never do!) the flour into a large bowl and add the sugar, salt and baking powder.

2. In a separate bowl/jug beat the egg and add the milk and butter, when you’ve mixed this add the mincemeat and give a thorough stir. (The mincemeat will sink and not want to mix, but this will make more even muffins if you do this)

3. Add the mincemeat mix to the flour bowl and with a large metal spoon (if you have one!) combine loosely (about 15 seconds). The mixture shouldn’t look like a sponge cake mixture, all nice and smooth, only stir a few times until most of the mixture is combined, there should still be some clumps of flour.

4. Spoon the mixture into your muffin tins and put in top of oven for 15-20 minutes. When they’re nicely browned and risen take them out of the oven and then after 5 more minutes take out of tin and move to a wire rack so they don’t sweat in the tin.

Just before eating dust with icing sugar! Yum yum!