Easter baking

Like Christmas, Easter provides the keen cook with the opportunity to spend hours in the kitchen. There’s the traditional dinner of roast lamb – the springtime counterpart to the roast turkey Christmas dinner.
And when it comes to baking, Easter offers its own slightly lighter variants of Christmas delights, which stlll contain many of the same ingredients, specifically dried fruit, nuts and marzipan. Instead of the heavy fruited Christmas cake there’s the simnel cake, which can be made at the last minute, dispenses with the icing and makes a real feature of the marzipan. And the dense alcohol-rich fruited filling of the mince pie gives way to the lightly fruited and spiced hot cross bun.  Continue reading “Easter baking”

Good Friday baking

The bun is somewhat spicy inside, and has a sugary glaze on the top, with a cross marked or stamped thereon. Whether it is eaten hot or cold, with butter or without, toasted or untoasted, each family decides according to circumstances; (Charles Dickens, Household Words, 1870)

Last Good Friday I posted about hot cross buns – their historical origins and references to them in popular culture and literature. However, I wasn’t organised enough to write the post until Good Friday, by which time it seemed a little late to give the recipe as anyone reading the blog would certainly have already consumed their hot cross buns.   Continue reading “Good Friday baking”

Hot Cross Buns

One of the things I love about food is the way that different foods mark out the year, its changing seasons and its various festivals.  I particularly love cooking at Christmas and Easter,  partly because many of the things i make on these occasions are once a year treats: the rarity of mince pies, Christmas cake and simnel cake makes both the making and eating of them all the more exciting.  Continue reading “Hot Cross Buns”