Once you venture into Homemade hot cross buns you will never buy them again! Try these or some other baking for Easter – check out our Easter recipes page
These buns take a few hours to prepare in order to get the dough to rise so if you want them for tea you should start making them in the morning!
For this recipe first Combine the beaten egg with enough warm water to give approximately ½ pint of liquid. Then whisk in the yeast, sugar and flour, cover and put in a warm place for 30 minutes. Sieve the flour salt and spices into a large bowl and rub in the butter. Make a well in the centre and add in the sugar and lemon zest and then mix in the dried fruit or mixed peel. Knead into a large dough ball and leave in a warm place to rise for an hour. Knead again to get rid of any bubbles and then bring back to a large ball and leave for another 30 minutes to rise further. You them shape the dough into 12 buns and mark each one deeply with a cross. You can pipe into the cross a wet mixture of flour and water mixture and then bake for 8-12 minutes. Glaze with Golden syrup as soon as they come out of the oven.
Hot cross bun with a marzipan twist has the variation of thinly rolled marzipan placed into the crosses and then the buns are glazed with a mixture of sugar and warmed milk.
Candlebridgebakery has shared her delicious recipe which is for Traditional Hot Cross Honey buns with a Vanilla Cross In This recipe you heat the milk in a measuring jug and dissolve the yeast. In another measuring jug beat the two eggs together and add the honey, natural vanilla essence, melted butter and corn oil and mix these well together. In a large mixing bowl sieve the strong bread flour, plain flour, gram flour, powdered cream, castor sugar, allspice, cinnamon, salt and bicarbonate of soda and then add the dried fruit. You then make a well and add the yeast mixture and then the egg mixture and combine together to make a dough. Knead the dough and then leave to rise for 90 minutes. Knead again and then leave for another 90 minutes (This isnt a quick thing to do!)
Now roll into balls the size you want your buns to be , flatten a little and mark with a cross using a knife – pulling the dough away from the cross to emphasis the cross. Glaze with a mixture of honey and hot water and then bake for 15 minutes. To make the vanilla frosting to go into the cross, sieve your icing sugar, and mix with hot water and vanilla essence and spoon the fondant into the cross.
Then the most ingenious part of the process was thought of by my husband Kenny. We tied a piece of string to a bamboo skewer and the other end to a toothpick. We anchored the skewer into the middle of the cake and then turned the toothpick to tighten the string and used it is a sort of compass drawing a circle of different sizes onto the top of the cake. To make the circle smaller you just had to wind more of the string around the toothpick.
