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Hot Cross Buns
2 cakes FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 7 1/2 cups sifted flour 1/2 cup butter 2/3 cup sugar 2 eggs 1/2 cup raisins or currants 1/2 teaspoonful salt THE quaint old-world custom of serving Hot Cross Buns on Good Friday has been widely adopted in "the States." You'll like them made by these directions. Dissolve yeast and two tablespoonfuls sugar in lukewarm milk. Add three and one-quarter cups flour, to make sponge. Beat until smooth, cover and let rise until light, in warm place, free from draught--about one hour. Add butter and sugar creamed, eggs well beaten, raisins or currants, which have been floured, rest of flour, or enough to make a moderately soft dough, and salt. Turn on board, knead lightly, place in greased bowl.
Cover and set aside in warm place, until double in bulk, which should be in about two hours. Shape with hand into medium sized round buns, place in well-greased shallow pans about two inches apart. Cover and let rise again--about one hour, or until light.
Glaze with egg diluted with water. With sharp knife cut a cross on top of each. Bake twenty minutes. Just before removing from oven, brush with sugar moistened with water. While hot, fill cross with plain frosting.
A large sponge-method batch, lightly sweetened and lightly fruited, shaped by hand. The crosses are not made the way a modern recipe makes them, and that is the part of the page to read twice.
- The cross is cut and filled, not pipedA modern bun carries a cross of flour-and-water paste piped on before baking. Here the cross is cut into the proofed bun with a sharp knife, and plain frosting is run into the cut while the buns are still hot from the oven. Both are traditional. Cutting a fully risen bun deflates it a little, so keep the cut shallow and work quickly.
- There is no spice in itNo cinnamon, no nutmeg, no mixed peel, no zest. Against the English bun this is a notably plain article: two-thirds of a cup of sugar across seven and a half cups of flour, fruited only with raisins or currants. Spicing it is a departure from this recipe rather than a correction of it.
- Flouring the fruitThe raisins are tossed in flour before they go in. The coating keeps them from sinking through a soft dough and from smearing as the dough is worked around them. Take that flour from the quantity already measured instead of adding more.
- Two glazes, doing two jobsEgg beaten with water before baking gives the color. Sugar moistened with water, brushed on in the last moment before the buns leave the oven, gives the shine and sets to a light tack. Skipping the second is the common reason homemade buns look dull next to a bakery's.
- Scale, and the yeast with itSeven and a half cups of flour is a large batch and the page states no yield. Two cakes is roughly four and a half teaspoons of active dry yeast, which suits that quantity. Halving the recipe works cleanly as long as the yeast is halved too, rather than kept at full strength for speed.
Hot cross buns belong to Good Friday and to the breaking of the Lenten fast, and the English tradition behind them is old enough that its beginnings are argued over rather than known. What this page records is narrower and more certain: in 1920 an American yeast company still had to introduce the custom to its readers. The copy calls it quaint and old-world, puts “the States” in quotation marks as though the phrase needed holding at arm's length, and presents the bun as something lately and widely adopted rather than as a fixed part of the year. The recipe bears that out. It is unspiced, lightly fruited, and finished by running frosting into the cross, which is an American sweet-roll habit applied to an English shape.