Decadence

The Guardian is sinking very low in its efforts to balance its books, today carrying a full page advertisement for flavoured hot cross buns. You can have Belgian chocolate, cheese and onion, cranberry and sea salt and three other flavours which I forget.

Whereas I thought that the whole point of hot cross buns - apart from religious symbolism - was that they were quite strongly flavoured already with various spices, spices which would have once been expensive and high status.

All I can say is that whoever it is that the likes of M&S are aiming their buns at, must have very jaded palettes. Perhaps worn down by years of ready meals.

I am considering making real hot cross buns myself tomorrow as a more or less private act of protest and defiance. Buns of this sort were made in 2015 and noticed at reference 2, while in 2016 I made cakes rather than buns. But not so successfully that I noticed them at the time, so that while they were logged in the breadsheet, the blog'tice is absent. And with Dropbox changing the arrangements for public documents, the former is not going to be present again until I get around to reading the new instructions.

BH told me later me that Sainsbury's are at it too and that she is very cross with herself for having bought some flavoured ones by mistake.

PS: thinking about it while I type, it seems odd that we should mark the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross by eating a symbol for the Cross. I am sure that Frazer, Lord of the Golden Bough, would have had something to say about it - being very strong on sacrifices involving killing the king - had he not thought that the church, in his day still a power in the land, might not have borne down on him, perhaps to the extent of confiscating his fellowship at Trinity, a place where one should show respect for same. See reference 3.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/buns.html.

Reference 2: absent.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/raynes-park.html.