I have made a lot of hot cross buns in my time, for example these wholewheat hot cross buns and my even healthier hot cross buns a couple of years later.
However I really really like Hot Cross Buns, so I felt it necessary to bake them again this year. To me it feels a little like Christmas baking. You know with the oven on, baking, cinnamon, mixed spice, sultanas etc. Admittedly in previous years at Easter it wasn’t so cold that it actually felt like Christmas!
I followed the recipe for these Hot Cross Muffin Buns from the BBC Good Food website. The recipe is for use in a bread machine, but I managed fine without one.
I mixed all the ingredients together with the dough hook on my Kenwood Chef. For the dried fruit I used a selection left over from my christmas baking, dried cherries (around 50 grams), sultanas (around 30 grams) and mixed peel (around 20 grams). I know a lot of people don’t like mixed peel, but I love the slight citrusy flavour you get from it.
After mixing in the dried fruit I left the dough to rise for about 30 minutes, then I split into small equal sized balls placing them within a square of greaseproof paper in my muffin tin. As they were still pretty small I left them for another 30 minutes to rise, this wasn’t quite long enough due to the low temperatures, but by that point I was too hungry!
In comparison with my other hot cross bun recipes, these were a bit fluffier due to the plain flour rather than wholewheat. On top I glazed them with a wash of dissolved icing sugar. The recipe states you should use golden syrup but mine was at least a year out of date!
I won’t pretend these hot cross muffins were healthy – but they did taste delicious!
Want to see more of my Easter recipes or hear more about my latest recipes? I am @coffeemuffins on twitter.