Hey everybody. It's Sam here from Sugar Spun Run and today I'm showing you how to make hot cross buns.
You've probably heard of hot cross buns before maybe in
the children's nursery rhyme, but have you ever made them yourself?
They are a classic sweet roll that's really popular around Easter time. Today,
I'm going to show you how I make my hot cross buns, and this recipe does use
yeast. There's a little bit of technique involved, but overall it's pretty
straightforward and simple. So let's get started. Now the first thing you're going
to need, you're actually going to need five and one thirds cup of all-purpose
flour, for this recipe, however, we are going to start with just two cups, and
I'm going to add this to the bowl of my stand mixer.
I'm also going to add 2/3 cup of granulated sugar
and 5 teaspoons, now this is about two packets, of instant yeast.
We'll add one teaspoon of salt and now we'll add some spices. Traditionally,
hot cross buns are lightly spiced. So we're going to start with one and a half
teaspoons of ground cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon of allspice, and 1/4 teaspoon of
ground nutmeg. I'll just want to stir these together to
make sure everything's nicely combined. I'm just going to use a spatula right
now, just because my dough hook, there's not enough in my bowl right now for my
dough hook you do a good job of making sure everything's thoroughly combined.
The next thing you need is one in 1/3 cup of whole milk. So to this milk we are
actually going to add 6 tablespoons of unsalted butter, and as you can see here
I've gone ahead and I've cut this, I've diced the butter into smaller pieces. So
I'm gonna add this in with my milk.
So now we need to heat our butter and our
milk together. You want to get the butter mostly melted, and you want this mixture
to reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit. You can do this in a saucepan, I'm actually just
going to pop mine in the microwave for about a minute,
and once that minutes over I'm going to stir it and check the temperature. You
need the temperature to be 120 degrees Fahrenheit. If it gets too hot, let it
cool back down to that temperature before adding it to your flour ingredients
So my milk and butter mixture is at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, so
I'm actually going to turn my mixer to low speed, and I'm going to slowly add this milk mixture.
And if you have a larger mixer bowl like I do, and it has
trouble getting the flour on the sides and the bottom, you're going to want to
use your spatula just to make sure you get all of the flour incorporated with that milk mixture.
Now that everything is combined here, we're going to add
large eggs. You want these to be at room temperature and I'm going to lightly
scramble them with a fork just to make it easier for them to incorporate into the dough.
Turn my mixer to low speed, and we'll add them in.
Our dough is gonna be looking a little soupy right now. That's totally fine. We'll be adding more flour in a
minute, but before we do tha,t we want to add either our raisins, or currants, which
are traditionally added to hot cross buns. I'm using currants here. I'm just going to add them in.
And that's just 2/3 cup of either raisins or currants.
I'm also going to add some orange zest. You can add up to a tablespoon of orange
zest to this. I'm just gonna grate it directly into my mixer bowl.
Make sure to keep turning your orange as you're grating it. As you can see, I don't go
too deep into the orange. If you get down to the white part, it's called the pith,
it's actually very bitter. It'll make your Hot Cross Buns bitter so you want to avoid that.
I'm just gonna stir in the currants and the orange zest using my spatula.
I mentioned earlier that we need 5 and 1/3 cups of all-purpose flour
overall, but so far we've only used 2 of those cups. So the remainder of the flour
is going to be added now, but we're not going to add it all at once. We're going
to add it gradually until the dough reaches the consistency that we're looking for.
If you need to, especially in the beginning, you can certainly pause
your mixer and use a spatula to scrape the sides and bottom. You really want to
make sure that all of the ingredients are nicely incorporated.
One thing I really want to stress, when you're making hot cross buns, is that you might
actually need more or less than the 5 and 1/3 cup of flour that's indicated.
When you're making a dough, you really want to go by the feel of the dough. You
want it to be tacky, clinging to itself, not too sticky though.
We're almost there with this dough, but it's still too sticky, and it's not pulling away from
the sides of the bowl like we want. So I'm gonna add more flour.
Just a little bit you don't want to overdo it.
This is more of what I'm talking about. As you can see, the dough is clinging to itself, pulling away from the sides of the bowl.
It has a nice elastic texture.
And if I touch it, it's tacky to the touch, but it's not coming away on my fingers. It's not too sticky. So what we'll want to do
with this dough now is we're going to transfer it to a large lightly oiled bowl.
Now our hot cross bun dough is going into this bowl, and I'm just going
to roll it through the bowl so that the surface of our dough is covered with a
very thin coating of olive oil. You'll want to cover your bowl tightly with
plastic wrap, and now this dough is going to need to rise. So you want this dough
to rise until it's doubled in size and typically for me that takes about an
hour. You want to put it in a warm draft-free place. Now for me this is
usually the top of my oven when my oven is on. You are going to need your oven
temperature to be 350 degrees Fahrenheit before you can bake these hot cross buns,
and while that's a little bit away still I usually like to preheat my oven at
this point. That way my rolls have a nice warm place to rise.
Alright so our dough has doubled in size. So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna punch this
down to deflate it. We'll turn this out onto a lightly floured surface.
Now all we need to do is divide this dough into 12 pieces, because we're going to be
making 12 rolls. Now you can do this however you want. The easiest way I've
found to make even sized rolls it's just to shape the dough into a 12-inch log,
and just cut that into 12 even size pieces.
And then form each of these pieces into a nice bun shape.
Now to cook your hot cross buns, you're going to want a 9 by 13 pan. I'm using a ceramic pan and I've lightly greased the sides and
bottom of the pan with butter. I'm going to place each bun into this pan. I want
to space them evenly it's gonna be four rows of three.
Now cover your dish with plastic wrap.
And we are going to return this to our warm place and let it rise
again for another twenty to thirty minutes, and if you haven't already
preheated your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit you're going to want to go ahead and do that now.
So once our hot cross buns have risen, now we're just
going to want to really quickly brush them with an egg wash. Now to make this, you
just need one large egg and just two teaspoons of water, and just use a fork
to scramble this egg pretty well. Now I'm just going to use a pastry brush to
generously brush each hot cross bun with a little bit of egg wash.
And this egg wash is going to help give them a nice golden brown color on top.
You won't use all of the egg wash so just discard whatever you don't need, and now our hot
cross buns are finally ready to bake. These are going to go into your 350
degrees Fahrenheit preheated oven and they'll need to bake for about 30-32 minutes.
You'll be able to tell the rolls are done when they're a nice golden
brown color on top, and they are firm and sound hollow when tapped on top.
We're going to let those Hot Cross Buns cool and meanwhile we're going to make
our frosting to make our crosses. T he first thing that you're going to need is
one cup of powdered sugar.
and I'll add 3/4 teaspoon of lemon juice just for a little bit of flavor.
And then some milk you'll need only about one to three
tablespoons of milk to make this frosting. We're just going to add a
little bit of time until the right consistency is reached.
And if you mess this up like I just did here and add too much milk, you can always very easily fix
that by adding a little bit more powdered sugar.
This consistency here is looking pretty good it's pretty thick. If you pull your whisk straight out of the
frosting, the trail that it leaves, it takes a minute before that recedes back
into the rest of the frosting. So I know it's going to hold its shape when we
pipe it onto our hot cross buns. So the easiest way to have to pipe it onto your
hot cross buns, I'm just going to pour mine into a ziploc bag. I'm gonna snip
the corner and then pipe it over my hot cross buns.
Ideally, we would give this frosting a little bit of time to set. It usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes for
the frosting to solidify. I don't have that kind of patience, so we're going to
dig in now. It might be a little messy but that's okay.
And that is how you make hot cross buns. I really hope you guys enjoyed today's
recipe. If you try it out, please leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
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