Mince Pie Megatest VI

Classic Mince Pie reviews

Here, for your enjoyment, we present a tasty selection of some of our best pie reviews from previous years' tests - we've been chomping our way through Christmas pies for six years now, so we really know our festive food!

Duchy Originals

Year reviewed: 2006
Historically you became King of England by killing people – friends, family, the French – anybody who got in your way to the top. Those times are long gone though and now we find ourselves with a royal family that, with the best will in the world, couldn’t win a punch up in the car park of the Dog and Mullet, much less the battle of Agincourt. For shame! Still at least our dreary dauphin managed to cook up a half-decent pie, albeit a slightly fragile and curiously salty one.

Fortnum & Mason Mince Pies

Year reviewed: 2005
A considerable underachievement; nasty, terribly sweet, powdery, inedible, expensive. The poshest pie in the test did not do very well. The inedibility was not so much a question of taste as scale and construction, as these were some formidably stoic pies, the kind that the aristocracy probably use to build houses or hunt deer with.

M&S Classic Mince Pies

Year reviewed: 2008
Each year, one pie always tastes like a pond and this year it was the M&S Classic. Not necessarily a bad-tasting pond, but a pond nonetheless. The slightly chemical, brackish aftertaste leads us to imagine this particular pond had been polluted with the waste products from a tyre factory.

Mr Kipling’s Mince Pies

Year reviewed: 2006
In the ever-waged war between pie and cake it’s pretty clear which side Mr Kipling and his legions are backing. He bakes exceedingly good cakes, but his pies might well just be an attempt to discredit the opposition. Both the pastry and the filling failed to impress, though thankfully nobody died, and you do get eight in a box.

Sainsbury’s Basics Mince Pies

Year reviewed: 2006
If it's possible for he that lives by the sword to die by it then the same can also be said of pies, particularly cheap ones. The Sainsbury Basic pie was a small, flat, shuriken-like affair which, on balance, probably tasted only marginally better than said serrated ninja projectile. They may only cost 49p for six pies, but having had the honour of eating one, we think you’d get more enjoyment from chewing the plastic wrapping.

Tesco Iced Top Mince Pies

Year reviewed: 2005
Innovation can be a good thing, but there’s a reason why man invented the pie and then put down the rolling pin and stepped away. Along with nuclear weapons, Tesco’s Iced Top mince pies are the best proof yet that you can take tinkering and inventing too far. Some ideas should stay in the fevered brains of their insane creators. Suffice to say this scored a well-earned zero and is probably what they eat for afters in Hell.

Tesco Iced Top Mince Pies

Year reviewed: 2007
What happens when you make an iced jam tart but instead of jam you used mince pie filling? You get a pie (or possibly a tart) that’s sweeter than a bag of kittens and nearly as difficult to eat. If you're one of those people for whom food is just a sugar delivery system you'll probably love these and die with false teeth. Even the sweet-tooted of the team could only manage half a pie.