Lady Lunchalot

No, I’m not pregnant, but here’s a question for you. What do you get when you pour a kettle of boiling water down a rabbit hole?

Hot, cross bunnies of course!

Even though hot cross buns have been in the supermarket since Christmas, I’ve managed to restrain myself from buying any, knowing full well just how much butter I will feel compelled to slather all over them. My hips can only handle that much butter for one weekend a year - no use drawing it out any longer than that.

So today is Good Friday, and I decided to make my first ever batch of hot cross buns. Mama Lunchalot was flying in from Queensland this morning, and I know that she would like nothing more than to be greeted at the airport with the news that I had a bun in the oven, so who am I to disappoint?

O was dispatched to the bakery first thing this morning to pick up some fresh yeast. Many thanks to the friendly bakers at Yarraville Bakers Delight who were more than happy to give O some yeast for my baking, on the house.

I’d looked at a few recipes on the web, and it seemed to come down to a showdown between Delia Smith and the BBC. A few other bloggers gave Delia’s recipe the thumbs down, so I decided to stick with the BBC’s traditional hot cross bun recipe.

First I crumbled the yeast into a mixture of egg, sugar, flour and water and let it sit for half an hour while I vaccuumed the house. There was a cleaning frenzy afoot this morning, so I was letting the dough rise in between cleaning sessions.

Next I mixed in flour, spices, butter, sugar, lemon zest, salt and dried fruit and kneaded it with the dough hook on my wonderful Kitchen Aid. I didn’t have any mixed spice, so I followed Sam’s suggestion from Becks & Posh and mixed together a couple of teaspoons of nutmeg, allspice, ground cloves, ground ginger and cinnamon. It gave the buns just the right kick.

I let the dough rise for an hour. Yeast recipes always advise letting the dough rise in a warm place. In winter I always put dough by the heater, but it wasn’t cool enough to turn a heater on, so I put the dough on the ironing board next to the dryer in our poorly ventilated laundry while my washing dried. That room gets like a sauna. Perfect!

Next, I knocked it back and kneaded it again until the dough was nice and elastic. Kneading dough lengthens the strands of gluten that gives yeasty breads their lovely texture, so it’s important you knead it for long enough.

After this, I put another load of laundry in the dryer and let the dough rise for another 30 minutes before shaping each bun and cutting a cross in the top of them with scissors. After that I put them on a tray to… you guessed it, rise again.

After about 30 minutes I mixed a paste of flour and water and piped a cross onto each bun with a piping bag. I’d always wondered how they made the crosses on hot cross buns. Now I know! Then I baked them for about 10-15 minutes until brown.

The recipe included brushing the buns with golden syrup, but I didn’t have any so I mixed some treacle and honey and glazed the buns with that instead. It was a little darker than ideal, as it dulled the whiteness of the cross, but it tasted great. And there were no complaints from O or Mama Lunchalot. We’d scoffed seven of the sticky suckers within minutes of pulling them from the oven!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Recipes . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.