Homemade Hot Cross Buns

These were homemade Hot Cross Buns!

Before this Easter was coming, I received a newsletter from King Arther Flour. It was about Easter celebration breads and cute round buns with white crosses caught my eye. Warm spiced, slightly sweet fluffy buns with rum-soaked dried fruits? That sounded irresistible for me. I adapted the recipe from KAF and reduced each amount of all ingredients by 1/3. For dried fruits, I mixed candied cherries, citron, currants, golden hunza raisins and apricots. Also I replaced 4 oz of flour and 4 oz of water with 8oz of my unfed Sourdough starter. Probably because of these changes, the dough was so soft that I couldn't roll the dough into individual balls easily. I used extra flour on my hands and the work surface and managed to make nine balls, or technically blobs and packed them into a 8" x 8" pan. They were not round after all, but at least they didn't merge each other thanks to the extra flour. After brushing them with the mixture of egg white and milk, it was time to go into the oven.    

The baking time was another challenge. The recipe said 20 minutes, but my buns needed total about 50 minutes! During the baking, I loosely covered the pan with aluminum foil to keep the surface from getting too brown.

When the buns became cool, I decorated them with the signature white cross icing!

Each bun was pretty big. Just one piece was happily satisfying for breakfast.

We loved the buns! They were very tasty. The texture was tender and moist even after the long baking time. They were definitely well-spiced, which was, for me, a holiday taste. I can't wait to bake them again next Spring!