How I made hot cross buns

My annual hot cross bun making event went with the usual amount of drama today. Broken machinery, small child tantrums, expired ingredients, miss-timed everything. It could have gone a lot worse, as I was mixing up the flour and water paste to make the crosses to glue on, as the buns cooked away in the oven, and I was just saying to my mate Kim, who sat at the kitchen table, “wow, basically I am making crosses out of glue”, when she said “um, aren’t you supposed to put the crosses on *before* you bake the buns?”… oh yes. Of course. Lucky she mentioned that, otherwise they would have been Hot Glue Buns. 

The good things were that firstly they rose beautifully, the best success I have had with yeast yet. And secondly they are the perfect texture. Hardish and well baked on the outside, and soft and squooshy on the inside. Kim tasted one and said “while they might not look like it, they taste like real hot cross buns!” So that’s a thumbs up I think.

I used Delia’s bun recipe and did a fair bit of ad-libbing, especially at the yeast frothing stage, and I left out the lemon peel (sadly, as it was well and truly over it’s used-by date) so added generous gratings of lemon rind to both the dough and the sugar glaze. Oh and I have just read my post from last year’s bun making and I totally forgot to heat the milk. I think these are better than last year so it must not matter too much.

See Mike’s for another “How I made hot cross buns“, Pip-style.