Hot Cross Bun Recipe

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Gpats on 3 Apr 2019 at 18:34

With Easter fast approaching I was wondering if anyone had a Hot Cross Bun recipe they were willing to share?

I did a few batches last year and had some great success but cannot for the life of me find the recipe I used.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

My favourite is Traditional English Hot Cross Buns from Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread book page 266. It uses a sponge and has currants and candied mixed peel in the final mix.

If interested, I have the formula and instructions on a spreadsheet in my Dropbox that I can PM you the link.

Cheers.

King Arthur's recipe works well with 25% ww substitution.  I can't be bothered with the icing, preferring to keep them non-denominational.  It melts off and makes a mess of the toaster oven anyway.

Thanks for the heads up.  Gotta check on our mixed peel and mixed spice supply!

Happy Spring!

Tom

What are you going to call out at your hawker's stall though? "Buns, Non-denominational, Hot, Admittedly Made Only During The Easter Season But Don't Be Misled By That, They're Just Some Buns, OK!"? ?

Maybe "Buns That Attempt To Avoid Making Anyone Cross"? ?

 

Or... Perhaps I misinterpreted... Maybe you simply reject the idea of dainty new-fangled iced crosses on buns, preferring instead to slash the tops twice with a dull knife - you know, the old rugged cross. ?

Got a large sized lamb mold and looking for something other than a pound cake or "gutsy" marbled cake to fill it.  Perhaps making a cold crossed lamb would make a nice change.  Surface texture?

"Hot crossed" is not traditionally frosting or icing but a flour mixture (runny dough) placed as a cross on each bun before the bake so the cross is baked into the surface.  

Syd posted this execellent recipe

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/23021/hot-cross-buns

Probably the best method of preventing 2 pounds of ground lamb from shrinking is to not take me seriously. ?

Perhaps the best answer is that lowering the fat content and adding starchy fillers both limit shrinkage, but that it will always shrink to some extent, and very low-fat meat with a lot of filler is not everyone's idea of a good time.

:)

I've started on Syd's Pan de mie recipe and plan on a spiced bunny, whoops, lamb for part of the dough. It does make 2kg of dough and it's been on my bucket list for years.  I bet this braids nice too.

Yes Mini, you are right about the cross on top. The traditional cross was a mix of pastry flour, vegetable oil and water.  Pipped on top before going into the oven.  I loved them as a child and I make them every year for the grand-kids and of course us also.  Cheers.

Speaking of baked goods originating in Italy, and of hot cross buns, and so on - I think it's interesting just how (relatively) short the modern history of these ummm... "celebration breads" (if I can call them that) is. I had always imagined that such foods (or their broadly-similar forebears at least) had been around for many centuries, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Hot cross buns are fairly old but not nearly as old as I first imagined, panettone is even kind of new-ish, the dove bread only started because the big factories' Christmas panettone business was very successful and they wanted to create an Easter counterpart, etc.

Or - maybe these breads & buns DO have a longer history but no one really recorded it? Perhaps history is biased to record business transactions more than what happens in home kitchens (i.e. men writing history, women working in the kitchen, ugh), so perhaps the "history" only started when it became a business venture. I have no idea.

Apparently the cross wasn't done with a paste originally - it was done with a bun docker, as shown below.

My version was a lot more basic:

but it produced the desired result when used twice at right angles:

These with Hamelman's recipe, BTW. I have also made them with a crossing paste, but Hamelman's is too complex. My version was a mix of pastry flour and rice flour 50/50, lemon juice and water piped onto the buns.

Lance

I didn't know about the bun docker. Very interesting.  Thanks for your tip on the paste mix, I'll give it a try as I'm always on the lookout to replicate what I loved as a kid in the 1950's.  Hamelman's is an emulsified mix and needs a bit of work.

 

There are differing opinions or versions of which method for marking the crosses on the buns was "original". Some say actual pastry dough laid on top, some say docking/cutting, some say simple flour/water paste piped on... None of us were there at the time, and more importantly, no one knows who made the first hot cross bun!

Many of us have learned about this topic from sources we trust, but it's clear that no one alive in the 20th or 21st centuries can possibly have known the truth for certain - our trusted sources are no good on this one. Your guess is as good as mine - neither worse nor better.