The secret to baking the fluffiest hot cross buns

What makes a hot cross bun a hot cross bun? Is it in the bun: the spice, the dried fruit and citrus peel, or even the type of dough? Is it the way you eat it – hot! – sliced in half, toasted and dripping with butter? Or is it the cross itself? Hot cross bun purists will tell you that it’s all of the above, and that any deviation from the classic is, well, deviant. And more-over, that the buns should be eaten only on Good Friday, never before or after. But if recent examples are anything to go by, the rules are very loose.

Each year, as soon as Christmas is over, unorthodox hot cross buns line our supermarket shelves and cause opprobrium among the sticklers. There’s chocolate chip, chocolate orange, lemon and white chocolate, mocha; rhubarb and custard, strawberries and cream, sticky toffee pudding; cheese, cheese and Marmite, cheese and jalapeño. If the hot cross pedants are to be believed, each new flavour combination takes us one step closer to the end of civilisation.

Are they right, these traditionalists? Well, Easter buns haven’t always taken precisely the same form. The hot cross bun’s name came about in the 18th century, but buns with crosses cut into them were found in the remains of Pompei, and the Saxons ate crossed buns in April to celebrate Eostre, goddess of fertility and the dawn.

In the 14th century, Brother Thomas Rocliffe, a monk from St Albans, distributed a crossed bun to the local poor on Good Friday. This Alban bun contained currants and cardamom, and the cross was cut into it rather than piped. Rocliffe’s bun is considered the precursor to the hot cross bun. Later, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the sale of spiced buns was prohibited other than on Good Friday, Christmas and at burials.