These Mincemeat Pinwheels with Puff Pastry are a great alternative to mince pies. Using pre-rolled ready-made pastry, they’re quick and easy to bake for Christmas party season.
Updated 2026 · Now with printable recipe · Originally commissioned by Great British Chefs for Tesco Real Food
We were taking part in an online Great British Chefs cookery hangout. The session, led by chef Galton Blackiston, was to make Christmas Pudding Ice Cream. It was one of Galton’s recipes featured in a Tesco app of recipes you can make with kids at Christmas.
Ted stood on a chair next to the iPad, to perform the important task of stirring custard. But he had other ideas what we were making instead of ice cream.
I should add at this point that our custard never made it as far as the ice cream churn: we ate the custard drizzled over these instead:
“Can we make these mummy?” Ted asked.
They’re mincemeat puffs sprinkled with aniseed sugar. As with the other recipes on the app, they’re very quick and easy to make with children.
I should add now, that I didn’t keep a record of the app recipe so what follows is my own version we’ve recreated for several Christmases since. Below are a few pictures illustrating Ted helping with the recipe the first time we did it.
We got out some aniseed “flowers”. Ted had never seen these before and thought they were very pretty.
The round seeds are hidden inside the pointy dried petals.
To make aniseed sugar, Ted pressed the food processor button to blitz aniseed with icing sugar. My kitchen was quite chaotic, multi-tasking, that night as you can see.
Next Ted helped spread mincemeat all over a sheet of pre-rolled puff pastry – I evened it out a bit afterwards!!
Roll the two ends of the pastry up to the centre then slice into one inch slices.
Arrange them nicely on the baking sheet lined with parchment paper. You should brush with beaten egg at this point, although I don’t seem to have photographed that happening.
A quick sprinkling of that aniseed sugar. Ted was very proud of his creation.
Finally pop them them in the oven for around 12 minutes until golden brown.
Mincemeat Pinwheels With Puff Pastry
Equipment
- baking sheet lined with baking parchment paper
Ingredients
- 1 pack puff pastry ready-made, pre-rolled
- 200 g mincemeat from a jar
- 2 dried aniseed flowers
- 100 g icing sugar (confectioners sugar) sifted
- 1 egg small, beaten
Instructions
- Remove the puff pastry from the fridge 30 minutes before you need it. Preheat the oven to 200c / gas mark 6.
- Meanwhile, blitz the aniseed seeds with icing sugar - I used the small food processing bowl in my Magimix.
- Roll out the pastry, spread the mincemeat evenly across the surface.
- Along the long edge, roll the mincemeat covered pastry back up half way to the centre. Do the same from the opposite long edge.
- Cut the rolled pastry into pieces around 1 inch thick. Lay these out on a baking sheet with 2 inch gaps.
- Brush the pastries with beaten egg. Scatter with the aniseed icing sugar.
- Bake for 12-15 minutes until puffed up and golden.
These Mincemeat Pinwheels feature in my recipe collection of Alternatives To Mince Pies . For another kid-friendly puff pastry recipe, take a look at Peanut Butter and Jelly Parcels With Puff Pastry.
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