A post-Thanksgiving Christmas baking report: yesterday, I began my marathon stint to make mincemeat tarts as Christmas gifts. For a number of weeks, I've had a homemade mincemeat mixture sitting in a crock in the refrigerator to mellow and soak before I do my baking. The mixture consists of peel we candied last winter — orange, grapefruit, lemon, and lime — along with raisins, apricots, dates, and prunes, all chopped up, and a mix of pecans and almonds, also chopped. I soaked this in port wine and some pear schnapps we made a few years ago by macerating pears in vodka and adding a bit of sugar, and then added a mix of spices including nutmeg, cinnamon, coriander, ginger, and cardamom. I also grated two large honeycrisp apples into the mix and, yesterday, as I prepared to begin baking a mincemeat pie and mincemeat tarts, I melted a stick of butter and stirred it into the mix along with some almond meal to help absorb moisture as the pie/tarts baked.
