If you need some small pies making then Mr Kipling is your man. For Christmas the Apple Pie line gets switched to mincemeat and starts cranking out Mince Pies. To complete the transformation Mr Kipling puts a very neat little Christmas tree on the pie lid. Unfortunately Mr Kipling's special mincemeat failed to impress us by being a bit pasty and pale.

Mind you Mr Kipling likes his statistics and regales us with with the exceedingly jolly line "Butter enriched (3%) pastry filled with mincemeat (48%) containing succulent pieces of glacé cherry (6%) and topped with a sprinkling of sugar".

Simple logic dictates that this must be the biggest selling Mince Pie in the UK, and in the past its also been voted as the best whatever that means. You also know that Mr Tesco will be bombarding us with multibuy and BOGOF offers. In short your chances of making it through the festive season with out encountering one of these chappies are somewhat remote. So know your opponent.

For us the best thing about the Tesco Mince Pie is the Mincemeat which the younger members of staff decided tasted of Christmas. Important evidence of getting the overall balance of spice, sugar and acidity right. The shortcrust pastry is fine texture wise, although there is no attempt to lift the experience by reaching for the butter dish.

The star on top is a bit troublesome. My views on stars, skinny four point star = Bethlehem, six point = Star of David, five point = the works of Dennis Wheatley.

Naughty old ASDA. The only mince pie that we sampled that still had hydrogenated fat in. Normally this means margarine which for years was favoured by cooks for producing good pastry due to all that fine tuning by industrial chemists. However pastry wasn't a triumph of industrial pie making and the diminutive ASDA pie really had two things going for it. It looked quite nice and its mincemeat was quite punchy.

Six point star this time and the only dropped in pie crust in the pies which we reviewed which looked nice and retro.

Sainsbury's Mince Pies despite being the only ones to actually breakdown the composition of their mixed spice, Caraway, Cinnamon, Clove, Corriander, Ginger and Nutmeg were not the spiciest we tried. The immediate impression was a subtle but noticable adult taste of Christmas. A quick glance at the pack confirmed that Mr Sainsbury has been reaching for the Brandy bottle.

Some butter in the pastry (12%) helped lift that too and it seemed to be less sweet than others which helped to focus attention on the mincemeat.

Sensibly Sainsburys avoided the whole troublesome star issue and stuck a holly sprig on top. Although holly is not with out its problems, and can often be more confusing than festive. I've taken to modelling mine in CGI, Sainsburys are limited to a small piece of pastry.

These are not just Mince Pies but M&S Mince Pies. So are they any good with a slow motion close up shot of them gently steaming and some old bird singing their praises whilst some bloke plays mood music on his fuzz box. Well yes they are actually.

M&S refuse to drawn into any intrigue about stars or pagan imagery on their pies, and have opted for lots and lots of sugar and some nice fluting and crimping. All very tasteful. The pastry was by far the best we tried despite having less butter overall than Sainsbury's. The Mincemeat looked like it had been assembled from actual well known and fully formed ingredients like sultanas, currants and peel and spooned in rather than some brown gloopy stuff forced under pressure through stainless steel pipes.

The generous sugar coating was all very nice, but the fluted foil case was very impressive. The reflections in the silver foil put me in mind of Terminator 2. In fact if any of our mince pies were likely to jump out of a building on a motorbike grab on to our helicopter, smash their way in take over the controls and tell us to get out, it would be the M&S one.