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Hot Cross Buns
Take any ordinary bun dough and with a sharp knife slit top at right angles or press a cross on top of each with a long pencil. When nearly baked glaze, dredge the cross thus produced with granulated sugar, repeat glazing and dredging until the cross is filled with sugar. Complete baking. Cinnamon may be mixed with the sugar, or lemon extract.
FIVE ROSES is the only flour that is unreservedly and publicly 98″″ COM guaranteed by its makers to be Not Bleached-Not Blended It is the pure extract of Manitoba's plump, sun-ripened wheat kernels milled by purely mechanical process. With no other flour are you so positive of the purity, strength and wholesomeness of all your bake things.
This is a finishing technique rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a sweetened yeast bun dough shaped and proofed on the pan. Everything here happens in the last few minutes of baking.
- The hingeThe cross is a groove filled with sugar, not a paste piped on top. Cut or press it before baking, then build the white line up in layers of glaze and granulated sugar during the last stretch in the oven. One pass will not do it; the instruction is to repeat glazing and dredging until the groove is filled.
- What "glaze" means hereThe text does not say. On sweet buns of this period a glaze was commonly a wash of milk, or of sugar dissolved in a little milk or water, brushed on hot. An egg wash would brown faster under repeated sugaring and darken the cross you are trying to keep white.
- Oven temperatureYeast buns of this size bake at 375-400F. The original gives no number because a range oven was judged by hand and by colour.
- "When nearly baked"For standard buns that is roughly 12-15 minutes into an 18-20 minute bake: risen, set, just beginning to colour. Open the oven, brush and dredge quickly, and close it again so the temperature holds.
- The pencilUse the round end of a wooden spoon or a chopstick instead. A pencil pressed into raw dough is not something to repeat in a modern kitchen, and the tool only needs to make a firm cross-shaped channel about a quarter inch deep.
- Slit versus pressSlitting with a sharp knife opens further as the dough expands and gives a wide trough that holds more sugar; pressing keeps a neater, shallower line. Pressed crosses need the sugar built up more patiently.
- Flavouring the sugarCinnamon mixed into the granulated sugar tints the cross, so use it sparingly if you want the line to read white. The text offers lemon extract as the alternative and, as written, it too goes into the sugar, though stirring it into the glaze is easier.
- YieldAn ordinary bun dough made from about 4 cups of flour gives 12 to 16 buns. Serve the day they are baked, or split and toast them after.
- The advertising copyThe garbled "98″″ COM" and the paragraph about unbleached Manitoba wheat are printer's and scanner's residue from the Five Roses house advertisement, not part of the method. Any strong bread flour works.
Hot cross buns are traditionally tied to Good Friday in Britain and Ireland, and the marked bun long predates the modern piped version: bakers scored or pressed the cross into the dough, and the sugar-filled groove described here made the mark visible on a glazed bun without adding a separate paste. The Five Roses Cook Book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company u2014usually cited with Montreal as well as its western mills u2014and compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, was distributed as a premium with sacks of flour, which is why the page ends in advertising and why the instructions assume the reader already has a bun dough she uses regularly. The flour-paste cross piped from a bag is often said to have become standard in commercial bakeries later, when speed mattered more than the several trips to the oven door this method demands.