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Hot Cross Buns
1 cake compressed yeast 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoon sugar 1/3 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup raisins or currants 3¼ cups sifted flour 1 egg Dissolve the yeast and one tablespoon of sugar in the lukewarm milk. Add one and one half cups of the flour, to make a sponge. Beat until smooth; cover and let rise until light, in a warm place, free from draft-about one hour. Add butter and sugar creamed, egg well beaten, raisins or currants, which have been floured, rest of flour, or enough to make a soft dough, and salt. Turn on board; knead lightly; place in greased bowl. Cover and set aside in a 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 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 straightforward sponge-and-dough sweet bun; the only real gap is the oven temperature, which the original never gives.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe states twenty minutes and no heat. Enriched buns of this size bake at 400F for 15-20 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and the bottoms sound hollow. Watch them from 15 minutes on, since the egg glaze and sugar wash colour quickly.
- Compressed yeastA cake of the period was typically about 0.6 oz of fresh yeast, though sizes varied. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast. With instant you can skip proofing, but the sponge stage is worth keeping for flavour.
- Milk scalded and cooledScalding was held to neutralise something in raw milk that slackens dough (usually credited to whey proteins). With modern pasteurised milk most bakers find it can be skipped; simply warm the milk to about 105F. Milk much hotter than this begins to harm the yeast.
- Flouring the fruitTossing raisins or currants in flour is traditionally said to keep them from sinking, and does keep them from sticking together in the dough. Do it with a spoonful taken from the measured flour, not extra, or the dough tightens.
- The soft dough3 1/4 cups is a guide. Add the last half cup gradually and stop while the dough is still tacky; a stiff dough gives a dry, close bun. Knead lightly, as directed, rather than working it hard.
- Rising timesThe stated one hour, two hours, one hour are approximate and depend on how warm the place is; the recipe itself calls for a warm spot free from draft. Judge by doubling, not the clock.
- The sugar washBrushing sugar moistened with water in the last minute gives the traditional shine. Keep it thin, a teaspoon or two of water to a tablespoon of sugar, or it bakes to a gritty crust.
- The crossCutting a cross with a knife before baking, then piping frosting into the groove while hot, is the older method. The baked flour-paste cross common in British bakeries today is a different tradition.
- YieldAbout a dozen medium buns; use two pans, spaced two inches apart as directed so they rise upward rather than into each other.
Hot cross buns are traditionally associated with Good Friday, the cut or piped cross reading as a Lenten mark; spiced and cross-marked buns are recorded in England from the sixteenth century, and the Good Friday bun with its street cry appears in the eighteenth -- "one a penny, two a penny" was in print as a nursery rhyme by the 1790s. What is notable in this American version is its restraint: no cinnamon, nutmeg, mace or candied peel, only a quarter cup of raisins or currants in an otherwise plain sweet dough. The staged sponge method and exact cup measurements belong to a period when domestic-science teaching was pressing both into home baking.