Beef and Mushroom Pies

This is just a quickie. I didn't really want to post savoury recipes on this blog, but I made these and they turned out divine, I just had to share. The recipe is from Taste.com.au so I won't bother repeating it on here.

I had a bit of drama making these in that I bought a brand new casserole dish to cook the filling in only to have it explode on the stove top before I even started... Probably shouldn't buy cheap cookware from Kmart anymore. In the end I did the stove top parts in a saucepan and transferred it to a baking dish for its time in the oven. 

The only adjustments I made was to make shortcrust pastry bottoms for the pies. I used frozen pastry as I am not too confident in making my own just yet (and lets face it I was feeling lazy). Also my filling turned out a bit runny so I used more butter and flour and thickened it up.

I made the filling a day in advance so that it would be cool when I filled the bases. I blind baked the bases first then added the mixture and puff pastry tops for the final bake. The mixture is nice and chunky but still very tender, I prefer this to the mince-like filling you get in cheap frozen pies.

I made several different sizes just to experiment but I personally loved the tiny party pies the best. I still have filling and pastry left over so I will probably make some more during the week, they are pretty quick to whip up once the filling has been made. I might even try some with mash potato on top!