• Place your flour and xanthan gum into a large bowl and mix. Make sure your butter is cold, cut it into small cubes and rub it in until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
• Stir in your caster sugar.
• Beat your 2 eggs together in a separate bowl and gradually add them. Use a fork to bring it all together. It should form a ball and not be very crumbly. The ball might be a tiny bit sticky but very minimally.
• Wrap your pastry in cling film. Place in the fridge for 30 minutes (or the freezer). Don't skip this part - it's very important!
• Preheat your oven to 180C Fan / 200C and lightly grease a 12 hole muffin/cupcake tin.
• When your pastry is cold enough, roll it out either straight onto a floured work surface, or, my preferred way is to roll it out between two pieces of floured cling film or non-stick baking paper. Roll it to about 3mm thick.
• Use about a 9-10cm (circular or fluted circle) biscuit cutter to cut out the bases of your mince pies. Carefully ease them into the holes, pressing them in gently.
• Spoon about 1.5 tsp of mincemeat filling into each hole, filling them safely below the top of the pastry case. If topping your mince pies with a round lid, you can be a little more generous with the filling and fill until near the top.
• Re-roll the rest of your pastry to a similar thickness as before.

If topping with stars:

• Use a star-shaped cutter to cut out stars that are ideally smaller than your pastry case which WON'T touch the edges of your pastry case. If your stars touch the edge of the pastry cases like mine do in the photos, the middle of the stars will be a little sunken - unfortunately, I didn't have a smaller star-shaped cookie cutter!
• Simply place the pastry stars in the middle of your mince pies, not touching any edges of the pastry. If your stars are a little big like mine, then dab-egg wash or milk around the edge of each pastry case, then stick the stars to the pastry case.
• Brush the tops of each pie with a little more egg-wash or milk.

If topping with round lids:

• Use an 3in (7.5cm) round cutter to cut out as many lids as you need.
• Use a little milk or egg-wash to brush around the edge of each pastry case, then carefully press the round lid on top.
• Brush the tops of each pie with a little more egg-wash or milk.
• Generously sprinkle caster sugar on top of each mince pie.

To finish:

• Bake in the oven for around 20 minutes until golden. Keep checking as, depending on your oven, I find sometimes mince pies can take closer to 15 and sometimes closer to 25 minutes.
• Leave to cool before removing from the tin. If you made star mince pies, dust with a little icing sugar to finish if you fancy.