Hot cross buns with boozy raisins

Although I'm not Christian, seven years of living in the UK and going to an Anglican church has left me with a fondness of some of the cultural traditions celebrated there (mostly food related!): Shrove Tuesday (better known as Pancake Day), Christmas (with its lovely roast chicken and bread sauce), and of course, Easter. Easter's not just about chocolate bunnies and Cadbury Creme eggs. It's also about hot cross buns: a lightly spiced, sweet bun with a sticky sugar glaze.

It's not yet Easter (technically it's still Lent so I really shouldn't be indulging with such rich food as butter and spices, but oh well), but I decided to make hot cross buns today.

One of my favorite British recipe websites is Really Nice Recipes, a wonderful and carefully curated selection of recipes. The site design is very user-friendly, and all the recipes that I've tried thus far from this site have worked. Not one dud so far!



I used the hot cross bun recipe from this site, but added in a few tweaks of my own:

1. Instead of 190g strong/bread flour, I used 140g bread flour + 30g rye flour + 20g sourdough starter. 
2. I soaked the raisins overnight in a mixture of dark rum, Cointreau and a splash of Rogue Hazelnut Nectar brown ale before proceeding with the recipe. Very naughty! :)

Basic vanilla Victoria sponge cake

How many things that you learn in school are actually useful and delicious? At my high school in England, we all had to take two years of home economics (aka cooking) lessons. An elderly lady with a bouffant white hairdo oversaw my very first attempt at making Victoria sponge in a large lab kitchen. I remembered liking home ec lessons a lot - too bad there wasn't an option to continue them for GCSE!

I don't make plain vanilla sponge very often and have gone through a period of not being able to make a light airy sponge for the past few years. I blamed the humidity in Hong Kong for turning my attempts at sponge cake into dense bricks, but honestly, I think it was because I was trying to be too fancy and relied on complicated recipes. I've finally come full circle and accepted that there are some things in life you just shouldn't mess with, and Victoria sponge is one of them.

This sponge cake recipe is a good base for cakes and cupcakes.