Hot Cross Buns

For this first post I thought I'd do something seasonal; with Easter coming up fast I decided to try my hand at hot cross buns.

Hot cross buns use an enriched dough, a dough that as well as having the normal ingredients of flour, water and yeast also uses butter and eggs.  Enriched dough is a completely different beast to a standard bread dough; it starts out as a sticky, messy, weird feeling dough that with much kneading comes together into a beautifully soft, tender bread.  While not an overly complicated recipe it does take time and unless you have a mixer with a dough hook be prepared to get messy!

 
I took my basic enriched dough recipe from this Paul Hollywood recipe from the BBC's website - I've used it a couple of times before and it's always been successful.  It makes a lot of dough so I used half for the buns and froze the other half to use later on in the week to make Cinnamon AwesomeBuns (I'll post the recipe for those at some point soon)

Hot Cross Buns

Enriched dough

500g strong white bread flour
50g caster sugar
40g soft unsalted butter
2 sachets of instant yeast
2 tsp salt
150ml warm milk
140ml water

Extras to turn the dough into Hot Cross Buns
1 tsp mixed spice
75g raisins
2 tbsp plain flour

1. Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl being careful not to let the salt and the yeast touch as the salt will stop the yeast working.  Add the milk and most of the water.  Stir the mix with your hands then add the rest of the water.  Knead in the bowl until it comes together.

2.  Now for the really messy bit!  Turn the dough out on to a floured surface and knead for 10 minutes.  The dough should come together as a smooth ball once fully kneaded.  This will take time and you will get very messy fingers so this isn't a job to attempt when you're expecting an important phone call!  I find a dough scraper like this one from Amazon helped.

3.  Once the dough is forming a ball put it in a lightly oiled bowl and leave covered with clingfilm to prove for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.

4.  After proving the dough needs knocking back.  This basically means knocking all the air out of it.  I find the most satisfactory way to do this is to punch the dough.  There's something about seeing the way it deflates that fascinated me!

5.  Turn out onto a floured surface and knead again.  At this point I halved the dough and froze one part.   I then kneaded in 1 tsp of mixed spice and 75g of sultanas.  When they were fully incorporated I cut the dough into six buns and put them of trays to prove again (I could easily have got eight buns out of the mix but I wasn't sure how big they would be once they were proved)

6. After an hour I made up a paste using flour and water and using a piping bag piped the traditional cross design on the top of the buns.  They then went into a pre-heated oven at 240C/475F/Gas Mark 8 for 20 minutes.

In a pan heat a tablespoon of apricot jam and once the buns are cooked spread this over the top to give a lovely sticky glaze.

Delicious toasted with butter!