In anticipation of the Easter long weekend, colourful and sweet treats help us hop into Spring. Foil-wrapped bunnies, chocolate eggs – and more chocolate – are everywhere, along with tulips and daffodils to decorate our tables.
Bread is also at the forefront of Easter celebrations, playing an important role across many different cultures and traditions.
In Italy, the Colomba Pasquale, a sweet dough similar to panettone, is shaped like a dove, veiled with crystallized sugar and studded with unpeeled almonds. From the port of Rome, pizza Civitavecchia, not a pizza pie but a sweet bread distinguished by a slanted domed top, imbued with flavours of port, ricotta and anise seeds. Tsoureki is a fixture on the Greek Easter table. A sweet bread, cousin to both challah and brioche, it’s braided and sprinkled with nuts, and often infused with aromatic mastica.
More common and readily available is the hot cross bun.
Traditionally served at the end of Lent, it's a rich bun marked with a cross of thick white icing or flour paste and features chopped, candied citrus peel and/or candied fruit. Within the honey-hued glaze of this small, spiced bread lies deep history, one that has scudded across the epochs from paganism to Christianity.
The Saxons ate buns marked with crosses in honour of Eostre, the goddess of Spring or light, who gave her name to Easter. And in the late 16th century, Queen Elizabeth forbade the sale of the honey-hued bun at any time other than burials, Good Friday and Christmas.
Our modern recipe is attributed to the 12th or 14th centuries – depending on sources – where a monk first mixed yeast with cinnamon, baking the buns and giving them to the poor.
Today, just like stores that carry Christmas decor before Halloween, the hot cross bun is available way ahead of Easter celebrations.
Veering off from the bun's humble origins, the ingredient list of the industrial-baked versions are understood only if you have a science degree. In smaller volume, and from artisan bakeries, good, minimal and traditional ingredients are the norm.
But in some instances, open season for experimentation has been declared.
COBS Bread Bakery in Penticton, for example, throws caution to the wind with four flavours of the bun: raisin and currant, raspberry-white chocolate, cranberry-orange, and apple and cinnamon. Out there in the world, the hot cross bun has clearly lost its mind with flavours such as tiramisu, aged cheddar, pizza, salted peanut butter and jelly, and chorizo and oregano.
Jan Petrasek of Petrasek Bakery, dials it back with a more traditional approach, creating a delicate but rich buttery and spiced brioche dough studded with raisins and candied orange and lemon peel. Marked with a thick cross of flour and butter and an egg-wash glaze, they’ve been in production for two weeks already, baked fresh everyday. And as we reach closer to Easter, the volume will go from the current 48 to 100 a day, to 500! (A shout-out also goes to their gingerbread Easter bunnies, made from Petrasek’s signature spice mixture, that Jan claims “is worth millions!” They’re delicious and cute as, well, a bunny.)
The ratio of butter-flour-eggs in a sweet dough such as the hot cross bun helps it retain moisture, and ensures a product that is still delicious even left on the kitchen counter a few days.
Petrasek agrees with me that they “make great toast” - gilding the lily with more butter - and even better “French toast”. Enjoyed fresh at the bakery, they are exquisite with a strong coffee.
Baker Heather Jefferys gives an elevated take on her hot cross bun recipe. She bakes out of the Naramata Centre, selling her breads and pastries at various events in the city and at the Naramata Farmers Market. And when she not baking she’s travelling and working, apprenticing at artisan bakeries around the world.
She developed a recipe for a fluffy brioche dough, flavoured with a mixture of warm spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg. The buns are studded throughout with golden raisins, currants and handmade candied orange peel, all of them first soaked in Earl Grey tea to enrich their flavour and soften their texture.
Her sweet creation is then finished with a traditional cross shape and a glazing of apricot syrup to make it shine.
This Easter Sunday, she’ll be selling them – and so much more – at Abandoned Rail Brewing on the Naramata Bench, sold individually or in packs of six. Or you can pre-order via her instagram account, @handfulof_
Whatever your hot cross bun persuasion, whether its pagan, religious or just pure decadence, you have many options to choose from – just not pizza flavour, thank you very much.
