My hot cross buns recipe for Easter makes a delightful dough that’s rich, spicy and fruity. As I’ve been baking these hot cross buns for Easter in our Cambodian kitchen for many years now, I’ve given this Good Friday treat a Southeast Asian twist with gentle hints of spice and candied tropical fruits, yet still kept the traditional texture. This is an easy hot cross buns recipe and far healthier than buying supermarket hot cross buns as they’re made from scratch.
Some years ago we were at Lara’s mum’s house in Bendigo, Australia, eating terribly disappointing hot cross buns that we’d bought from the local bakery and supermarket. They squashed to next to nothing beneath your finger tips and lacked the spice notes we both remembered fondly from the hot cross buns we ate as kids growing up in Australia.
Most of our nearly three decades living abroad have been spent in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, which means we use a lot of spices in our everyday cooking. It also means we haven’t had many Easters and therefore haven’t eaten a whole lot of hot cross buns. That means cravings. And not only cravings for hot cross buns.
If you follow us on Instagram, in addition to cooking Southeast Asian food, Lara cooks a fair bit of her family’s Russian-Ukrainian food and I do a lot of sourdough baking, primarily to satisfy cravings for things we miss from ‘home’. Also because it’s difficult to get great bread in Cambodia and I can make better quality bread at home. Although Siem Reap bakeries are getting better. So naturally, every year as Easter approaches, I’m making hot cross buns.
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Hot Cross Buns Recipe for Easter with a Spicy Fruity Southeast Asian Twist
As our regular, long-time readers know, I love to bake – everything from meat pies and sausage rolls to sourdough bread, which I’ve been baking for many years. Despite the backlash, I find sourdough baking deeply satisfying, easy, and therapeutic, and sourdough bread far more delicious than any other bread, and much more affordable to bake than buying overpriced bakery loaves.
But I began baking long before I began obsessing over achieving the perfect loaf of sourdough. Only a year or so after Lara and I first moved in together in Sydney, I was baking croissants and making choux pastry (‘pâte à choux’) in the compact garden kitchen of the four-room basement flat of an enormous terrace house that we called home in Balmain. I’d take plates of profiteroles to dinner with friends from uni, becoming very popular as a result.
Romantic that I was then, my next baking project was buttery shortbread crust (or ‘pâte sucrée’ in French) so I could bake Lara one of her all-time favourite sweets, small classic French fruit tarts. (I will eventually get around to sharing my decades-old recipe here). We used to take them to the park by the wharf at East Balmain on Saturday mornings to snack on while we read the newspapers.
After moving to the United Arab Emirates, so Lara could take up an academic job (teaching media studies, writing and filmmaking, and creating the first generation of Emirati women to work in film and television in the process), I tried my hand at everything from Middle Eastern flatbreads to French bread rolls for the dinner parties we had for work colleagues who became friends.
I started experimenting with this hot cross buns recipe many years ago. Whenever I cook, I have always had a tendency – Lara calls it an obsession – to test out a wide of array of different recipes until I find just the right one, and then I’ll tweak and tweak until it’s absolutely perfect.
But since we’ve been living in Siem Reap, I’ve also found myself giving Australian and European dishes a Cambodian or Southeast Asian twist by substituting or adding local ingredients such as Asian spices to recipes. (Lara also has a tendency to use local spices and herbs, as she did with this Cuban mojito recipe).
All of that is to explain why this hot cross buns recipe is made with Chinese five spice instead of allspice and candied ginger and candied tamarind, produced locally here in Cambodia. Dried tropical fruits, candied tropical fruits and fruit leather are all very easy to get here in Cambodia and they are wonderful and ‘fresh’.
Nothing is wasted here. Near the end of each fruit season, as you travel through villages in the countryside, you’ll see farmers will have various fruits finely sliced, pressed or diced, and laid out on trays or on flat baskets in the sun to dry. Now let me share a few tips to making this Easter hot cross buns recipe.
Tips to Making this Hot Cross Buns Recipe
Just a few tips to making my Easter hot cross buns recipe.
Hot Cross Bun Spices
Instead of adding allspice to the hot cross bun dough mix, I use Chinese five-spice in its place. I’ve also added a popular homegrown Cambodian spice, dried ground cardamom, as well, for its camphor and lemony notes.
Hot Cross Bun Fruit
An English or Australian hot cross buns recipe would call for dried fruit, such as currants and orange peel. I’ve used raisins, which are easier to get here than currants. I’ve also added candied ginger and candied tamarind, which are very local.
If you can’t find candied ginger and tamarind, experiment with other candied or dried fruits you can source.
Hot Cross Bun Dough
The dough mix for this hot cross buns recipe is a very wet one which makes it difficult, but not impossible to knead by hand. I prefer to use a stand mixer or a hand mixer, requiring very little hand kneading, apart from adding the dried fruit mix and shaping the buns.
Depending on how wet the mix is, coat the palms of your hands with vegetable oil or flour to stop the mix from sticking to your hands.
To Separate or Not to Separate the Buns?
From my childhood memories in Australia, hot cross buns were always baked so that they touched each other and rose together in a high-sided baking pan or loaf tin.
However, a lot of the English hot cross buns recipes that I tested while developing my hot cross buns recipe tried to not have the buns come in contact with each other.
While I like both ways you’ll get a taller rise from the joint buns as the separate buns will spread more while proving.
We often touch on the history of dishes and recipes as it intrigues us both, but Oliver Thring has done a good job of examining the history of hot cross buns in The Guardian, so we’ll leave you with that to read while your buns bake.
Serving the Hot Cross Buns
We love to eat hot cross buns fresh from the oven spread with lashings of butter. But if you’re baking big batches of hot cross buns ahead of Easter, you can toast the hot cross buns in a toaster oven or under an oven grill (broiler to our American friends), and spread with good quality butter.
Hot Cross Buns Recipe with a Southeast Asian Twist
Ingredients
- 250 g white flour - use a strong white flour
- 25 g brown sugar
- ½ tsp salt
- ¼ tsp ground cardamom
- ½ tsp ground cinnamon
- 1 ½ tsp five spice powder
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- zest of 1/4 orange
- 4 g dried yeast
- 150 ml milk
- 1 egg
- 25 g butter - unsalted, good quality, diced
- 100 g dried fruit - mix of raisins, candied ginger and candied tamarind, or whatever you like
The cross paste
- 50 g plain flour
- 20 g icing sugar
- 30 ml milk
Instructions
- Make the hot cross bun dough: in the bowl of a mixer (see notes), add flour, salt and sugar and combine, then add five spice, cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla extract, and orange zest to the flour. Thoroughly combine to distribute the salt in particular, as it can inhibit the yeast activation.
- Mix on a slow speed for 3 to 4 minutes, adding the cubes of butter, piece by piece, to ensure the butter is well distributed. When the dough has come together, easily comes off the sides of the bowl and sticks to the dough hook, the dough is ready. It should look wet and glossy.
- Add the fruit and knead the dough: Coat the palms of your hands with oil or flour, then place the dough on a floured workbench. Spread the dough out and sprinkle the dried and candied fruit on the dough. Gently knead the dough to mix the fruit through the dough for a couple of minutes.
- Prove the dough: Place the dough in an oiled bowl and cover with cling-wrap oiled on one side, being the side that might contact the dough as it rises. Prove for about 1½ – 2 hours in which time the dough should double.
- Once the dough has doubled in size, place the dough on a lightly floured workbench, and knock the dough back to expel the air.
- Divide the dough into pieces: separate the dough into 6 equal pieces that weigh around 100g each, then prepare a large baking tray lined with parchment paper.
- Create the bun shape: flatten each dough piece roughly and pick up a corner of the dough and press it into the middle of the dough. Repeat until you have formed a tight ball. Turn the dough ball over, which should reveal a smooth, taught surface.
- Prove the buns: place the finished buns evenly-spaced on the baking tray; lightly cover them with the oiled cling-wrap, and leave to prove the buns for one hour.
- Preheat the oven to 200°C while the buns are proving.
- Brush the buns with an egg wash: using a pastry brush, brush each bun with an egg wash made from a beaten egg and a little salt.
- Create the cross paste: to a small mixing bowl, combine the ingredients for the paste; as the paste needs to be piped, a good firm consistency is best. Place the mix in a piping bag and mark the crosses.
- Bake the buns: bake the hot cross buns for around 15 minutes, rotating the tray halfway through cooking. When the buns are a golden brown colour, they're ready.
- Allow the buns to cool: slide the tray out of the oven and transfer the hot cross buns to a wire rack to cool.
- Serve the hot cross buns: spread on lashings of good quality butter. Any leftover hot cross buns can be toasted and buttered.
Notes
Nutrition
We’ll be baking hot cross buns this weekend and we’d love to hear from you if you bake our hot cross buns recipe this Easter or another hot cross buns recipe in the Comments below.
