Bun day

Yesterday, that is to say Easter Monday, was designated hot cross bun day. A few days earlier than the corresponding day last year, noticed at reference 1.

We have several recipes for hot cross buns, but I more or less stuck to the one in the Radiation Cook Book, an old-style cook book where a recipe occupies perhaps a couple of inches of print, giving you several recipes to the page and no pictures. A cook book from the days when there was more home cooking than there is now and when the ladies doing it had more practise and did not need pictures and elaborate explanations of basic processes to help them along.

Bun entire

The construction of these buns turned out to take a very long time, with a first rise of more than four hours and a second rise of more than two, longer than I need to make bread. Quite why the yeast took so long to work its magic remains a mystery, but I think that next time I shall not attempt to jump start it in a mixture of warm milk and sugar, shall do it the bread way, just mixing the dried yeast powder in with the other dry ingredients.

Bun opened

The dough being rather peculiar, sticking to the mixing bowl in a most un-bread-like way, I settled for a single bun, rather than the dozen suggested. Which confused the cooking time. I went for 20 minutes at 200C, while BH, having inspected the result, thought that something lower and longer might have been better. While I am not so sure that the slight stickiness of the cooked bun was not due to it still being rather warm, perhaps just 10 minutes out of the oven.

A chunk of bun

Eaten in my case without any further butter (the mix already included a couple of ounces) and the whole thing had vanished maybe half an hour after it left the oven. The sort of thing that we used to do with seed cakes more than forty years ago, when we had more call for that sort of calorific intake.

I thought pretty good, certainly more fluffy looking than last year's effort. But I must try again soon, while I still remember the lessons from this time around.

PS: another puzzle is that this bun was brown, from the mixed spice and cinnamon, as directed, rather than from the flour which was white. So how do shop buns come out white? So how do the pictures in our other recipe books come out white?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/real-bun.html.