All About Easter and Hot Cross Buns in Australia

There is a moment every January when a supermarket puts out hot cross buns and somebody writes a letter to a newspaper about it. It happens every year, and every year the buns sell out anyway.

We have been baking them in Fortitude Valley long enough to have an opinion about that argument, and about most of the others: whether the cross means anything, whether chocolate ones count, and why a bun that was perfect at seven in the morning is disappointing by three in the afternoon.

Food for Every Season

Almost every food we treat as traditional was originally a way of using something up, or of marking a point in a year that people needed help keeping track of. Hot cross buns are both. Spiced, sweetened, enriched with fruit — the sort of baking you do when the plain stuff has run out and there is something to mark.

What survives is rarely the meaning. It is the recipe. Nobody in a Brisbane office at ten in the morning is thinking about the liturgical calendar. They are thinking about whether there is one left with more fruit in it.

That is not a loss. A food that only works if everyone remembers why it exists does not last four hundred years. Hot cross buns lasted because they are genuinely good, and because they arrive at exactly the point in the year when the weather turns and people want something warm again.

Things to Know About Cross Buns

The cross is not icing, and it is not cut into the dough. It is a thin paste of flour and water piped on before baking, which is why it stays matte and slightly chewy instead of sweet. If yours tastes of nothing, that is correct.

The gloss on top is a glaze brushed on while the buns are still hot — usually sugar syrup, sometimes apricot. It is doing more than looking good: it slows the crust drying out, which is the difference between a good bun at lunchtime and a dry one.

And the fruit should be soaked. Dried fruit put in straight from the packet steals moisture from the dough around it as it bakes, which is the real reason some buns feel dense.

The spice mix is where bakeries differ most. Cinnamon does the obvious work, but it is the nutmeg, allspice and a little clove that make a bun taste like Easter rather than like a fruit bun. Too heavy a hand and it turns medicinal; too light and you have made a raisin roll.

Easter Weekend in Australia

Easter here is a four-day weekend at the end of a hot summer, which makes it less about a roast and more about the drive north, the last swim of the season, and somebody's back deck.

That shapes what gets ordered. Very few people want a heavy sit-down dessert. What sells is what can be carried — a box of buns, a tray of small sweets, something that survives being handed around a table nobody is really sitting at.

It also means Good Friday and the Tuesday before are our two strangest days of the year: one where half of Brisbane wants buns at once, and one where every office in the city orders morning tea before the long weekend swallows everybody. Both are worth ordering ahead for.

Variations for Hot Cross Buns

The traditionalists lost this one about fifteen years ago and it is time to stop pretending otherwise. Chocolate, apple and cinnamon, coffee, sourdough, fruitless — they all sell, and the people buying them are not confused about what the original was.

Two are worth knowing about for practical reasons. Fruitless buns exist for children and for anyone who quietly picks the sultanas out, and they solve a real problem at a family gathering. Gluten free ones have improved enormously, though they stale faster, so buy them for the day rather than the week.

If you are ordering a mixed box for a group, the ratio that works is about two-thirds traditional to one-third everything else. Go heavier on the novelty flavours and you will find the fruit ones gone by nine and a lonely chocolate pile at lunchtime.

Hot Cross Buns at Work

The week before Easter is the busiest morning-tea week of the year for us, and it is easy to see why. A tray of buns is cheap per head, needs no cutlery, and does not require anyone to organise anything beyond putting butter next to it.

Two things make an office tray work. Order them warm or plan to toast them, because a room-temperature bun straight from a box is the version everyone is politely unenthusiastic about. And put out real butter in portions rather than one block with a knife — it is the difference between people taking one and people taking one properly.

Numbers, if it helps: allow one and a half per person for a morning tea and two if it is replacing lunch. There will still be some left, and there is no wrong number of hot cross buns to have left over.

At the End of the Occasion

The last thing worth saying is about the day after. A hot cross bun is at its best within hours of coming out of the oven, and honestly a bit sad on day two — but split, toasted and buttered it becomes a different and arguably better thing entirely.

Do not put them in the fridge. Bread stales fastest at fridge temperature, which is the opposite of what everyone assumes. A paper bag on the bench, or the freezer if it is going to be more than two days.

Freezing works better than people expect, provided you do it on the day rather than once they have already gone hard. Split them first — a frozen whole bun takes an age to come back, but a frozen half goes straight into a toaster and comes out close to new.

And if you find yourself with a dozen going stale, they make the best bread and butter pudding of the year. The spice and fruit are already in the bread, so you need nothing but eggs, milk and half an hour.

We bake ours through Lent and the weeks either side, in the Valley, the morning they go out. If you are putting on something bigger than a tray of buns, the cupcakes are the other thing people ask for at Easter — we listed the ones worth making in 10 Easter Cupcake Ideas 2020.