Treats from the Tipsy Turtle

I make the mincemeat about two weeks in advance so the fruit has time to soak up all the spices and get nice and plump! Then on Christmas Eve, I prepare the pastry and bake these little beauties for lunch on Christmas Day. I first made them last year and my mother and Chris, in particular, really liked them. Here's the pastry cast! The mincemeat recipe is from Mary Berry and the pastry crust is from Paul Hollywood! This is a sweet pastry so sugar is mixed with the flour before adding a LOT of butter. I worked the butter into the sugar and flour for a bit and then added the eggs. A little cold water was added till the dough just came together. I decided to divide the pastry into three balls and roll them out between parchment sheets before I refrigerated them. That way they would be nice and cold and ready to be cut into size for the muffin tins. I also refrigerated the muffin tin! When the pastry was cold and firm, I worked them one at a time; cutting the base out with a cookie cut...

This recipe is one of my absolute favorites that Grandma used to make at Christmastime. In the last years of her life she was not well and I was sad that I hadn't asked her for some of the recipes I loved so much. When I was visiting, I found her recipe book right on the counter! I found a couple of favorites, copied them down and I've been making them ever since. My good friend, Al, loved this dessert and called it the "purple goop". I think about him, too, when I make it. Here's the cast! The blueberries are drained, reserving the syrup. Unsweetened pineapple juice is added to the blueberry syrup and heated till very hot but not boiling. I do it in the microwave. Lemon Jell-o is added and stirred until dissolved. I keep scraping the bottom of the bowl to make sure there isn't any powder clinging to the bottom. Cold water is added, then the liquid is refrigerated until it begins to gel. My Grandma wrote, "until the mixture is like egg whites." When ...

Cut-out cookies fall perilously near working with pastry dough for me. When I was about fifteen or so I made cut-out cookies for Christmas. I didn't realize that re-rolling the dough, adding more flour as I went, would toughen things up. The cookies weren't bad to look at but they were even harder than biscotti...and biscotti are baked twice!  I did want to have Aiden and Layla decorate some cookies this year so I went to one of my trusted websites, in this case, Sally's Baking Addiction, and selected her cut-out sugar cookie recipe. Here's today's cast. Cream the butter till its smooth. Then add the sugar and mix till fluffy. Dry ingredients are mixed together in a separate bowl. Add the vanilla. And add the almond extract. Don't forget the egg! Add the dry to the wet and mix to combine. It's a bit of a sticky dough. Split the dough in half and place each ball on a sheet of parchment paper. Flatten into a round with your hands. Cover the flattened dough wit...