Christmas

The best Christmas party food and picky bits at M&S this year

Tiny pies, snowman bao, and fondue bites galore

Daisy Jackson - 16th December 2023

It just wouldn’t be Christmas without all your normal dinners being squashed down into teeny tiny portions and whacked on a buffet table – that’s right, it’s time for this year’s M&S Christmas party food round-up.

The fancy supermarket giant always goes big on picky bits, with elaborate creations that seem to get more odd every year.

Last year there was the obsession with making everything into festive shapes (like clementine-shaped pate, the antipasti wreath, and the garlic doughball Christmas tree).

This year, I think M&S has been on the wine.

You’ll find fridges full of street food style party food, including several creations that have definitely been inspired by a 3am takeaway.

That’s alongside all their usual fancy favourites, with truffle, tiger prawns, and melty cheese all over the place.

While all the supermarkets have loads of space dedicated to their party food selections, we all know M&S is king when it comes to completely excessive creations for the festive season.

And the best bit? It’s all priced on a 4-for-3 offer, so yThe ultimate booze tour around the bars of the Manchester Christmas Marketsou can get a free extra when you buy three items.

Here’s our pick of the best M&S Christmas party food for 2023.

British favourites… but really small

We all know Aunty Sheila loves a quiche – just imagine how her eyes will light up at the sight of a teeny weeny quiche bite.

M&S has got Christmas butternut, sage and and feta mini quiche bites, as well as cheese and bacon bitesize tarts.

Marks and Spencer is also championing the best British food of all time – pie – with a platter of mini pies, filled with chicken leek and bacon, or beef and ale.

And of course there are tiny chicken kyivs too, because who doesn’t want a mouthful of garlic butter and breadcrumbs before their Christmas dinner?

The takeaway-inspired, one-too-many-wines snacks

This section right here is definitive proof, if we ever needed it, that whoever is in charge of M&S’s party food is drunk.

This person has walked into work and slurred ‘I KNOW. Kebab. In pastry. And then salt and pepper chicken… Also in pastry. Yeeeah!’

The result is the sort of party food you’ll actually want to be faced with after hitting it too hard in the pub over Christmas.

There are weeny portions of pulled beef-loaded fries, spring rolls filled with salt and pepper chicken and a dipping pot of Chinese-style curry sauce, Chicken shawarma parcels, and southern fried chicken.

You can also grab M&S’s best-ever prawn toast with a ponzu dipping sauce.

Tiny meats on tiny carbs

Nothing soaks up one too many brandies like a too-big-mouthful of red meat and literally any form of carbohydrate.

So M&S’s Christmas party range has got that covered too, with all sorts of sandwich-inspired meals condensed into nibble-sized buffet snacks.

Do you want pulled beef on top of a potato rosti? They’ve got it. A tiny buttermilk chicken burger? Yep, that’s here too.

What about a very fancy-sounding Italian style meaty Ragu bread with a creamy cheese sauce dolloped on top? Or a mini steak sandwich with caramelised onion and mustard?

The ‘ohh someone’s doing well’

If you’re hosting any sort of gathering over Christmas, you’re probably frantically hoovering the carpets and rearranging your bookshelves to hide the Prince Harry autobiography in favour for something more high-brow.

But if you really want to impress your guests, the answer is surely truffles.

And for some reason when you make party food jet black, you look extra fancy. Enter the truffle arancini from M&S’s collection range, which are filled with mushrooms, vintage cheddar, and finished in a black breadcrumb.

M&S’s three-for-four party food range also has a selection of tiger prawn bites, each one wrapped in a different handmade filling.

There are prawn baguette toasts, prawn and coconut bites, and prawn and potato lattice balls. Very posh.

Say cheeeeeeese

European winters seem to not exist without a huge vat of molten cheese fondue, but that’s not exactly conducive to a stand-up Christmas party buffet.

So, in true Marks & Spencer style, they’ve wrapped a rich blend of cheeses into a crispy coating to create fried fondue bites, which are all melty and delicious in the middle.

And if you just wish your pigs in blankets were a little less oink and a little more fromage, try the cheesy pigs in blankets, where a blend of three cheeses are shaped into sausages and then wrapped in bacon. Because why not?

There’s always one

I don’t know how it happened but these days you’ll find bao all over the damn place.

You can get brunch bao, takeaway bao, dessert bao, and Christmas bao.

For the second year in a row, M&S’s Christmas party range includes a special festive-shaped fluffy bun.

Last year it was reindeer, this year they’ve gone even fancier with snowmen, complete with little red and green beanie hats and orange carrot noses.

Read more

• The ultimate booze tour around the bars of the Manchester Christmas Markets
• The best Christmas light trails in Greater Manchester and beyond
• Tesco has slashed the price of one-litre bottles of Baileys by more than 50%

Featured image: The Manc Group