Great British Bake Off Challenge: Mini Pork Pies with Quails Eggs

I know it's been a while since I last posted an attempt at one of the Great British Bake Off Technical Challenges, but I have still been making my way through them slowly. I'm just too lazy to blog about them! As soon as I showed John the list, he requested the pork pies straight away. However, I'd never used hot water pastry before, I almost never cook with pork and I barely even knew what gelatin was. It was definitely a recipe that made me panic! However, they've made two different pork pie style pies on the GBBO, and so I knew I had to overcome my fear! I started with the mini quail's egg pork pies, as they were made in a tin, rather than being hand raised. 

The recipe I used was this one, straight from the Great British Bake Off. The recipe was pretty easy to follow. The only slight issue I really had was on sizings. I found that the sizes of pastry discs to cut out that the recipe gave were much too big for my muffin tin, and there would never ever have been enough pastry if I'd done them all that size. As it was, I used all the pastry, and less than half the filling. Maybe do 1 and a half times the pastry, or less of the filling. In the end, I mixed up some more pastry used the rest of the filling to make another large pie that we had warm for dinner with veggies and gravy, so it all worked out for the best! 

The hot water pastry was easier than I thought actually. It was odd having hot pastry to work with, but it behaved itself well. I didn't roll it out quite thin enough, but I think that was my fault rather than the pastry! The rest of making up the pies was quite easy, just mix up the filling, boil and peel quail's eggs, then put it all inside the case and put another pastry disc on the top. 

Making up the pies 

Ready to go in the oven

Baked! 

The next difficult thing was getting the jelly into the pies. you mix gelatine with stock, then pour it in through the hole in the top of the pie. I don't know what I did wrong, but in almost all of my pies, there wasn't any space really between the filling and the pastry for the jelly to fill. A bit of wiggling did allow it to sort of pour in, but after they'd set and I cut it open, the jelly went in between the meat rather than round the edges. It didn't stop them tasting nice, but I'd love to try and get it right next time. 

I need 3 hands for photographing cooking. 

Finished pork pie the next day, after being left to set. 

Despite my misgivings with the jelly, they still made a delicious part of our picnic! 

So, pork pies successful (mostly). Not looking forward to the scary hand raised ones still on my list though!