My Mum makes Chocolate Tiffin every Christmas, and every year I promise that I will steal her recipe and make it for myself. I always forget.
However when I was thinking about recipes that I could make in the evenings after work, chocolate tiffin came to mind as it’s simple and it doesn’t involve the oven and timings and stress.
I have made a lot of hot cross buns in my time, for example these wholewheat hot cross buns and my even healthier hot cross buns a couple of years later.
However I really really like Hot Cross Buns, so I felt it necessary to bake them again this year. To me it feels a little like Christmas baking. You know with the oven on, baking, cinnamon, mixed spice, sultanas etc. Admittedly in previous years at Easter it wasn’t so cold that it actually felt like Christmas!
I was lucky enough to receive a “The Connoisseur” Easter Egg from Hotel Chocolat, earlier this month to try.
The box was impressive, highlighting the quality of the chocolate within, no thin cardboard boxes here. This chocolate egg is well protected.
This isn’t your average run of the mill chocolate easter egg, it is an extra thick dark chocolate easter egg.
Back in May 2010 I made wholewheat hot cross buns and I got a pretty good reception on them.
It’s not exactly the right time of year for Hot Cross Buns but I gave them another go, but then breads and sultanas never really go out of season!
So how can I claim these are healthier than my wholewheat 2010 buns? Well this time I substituted coconut oil for butter, low fat coconut milk for milk and Light At Heart sugar for, uhm, sugar.
I guess I should be up front about it – I was given Light At Heart sugar for free by Tate and Lyle, however I had been hearing about stevia based products for years and been dying to try them. Unfortunately until December 2011 they weren’t allowed to be sold in Europe! The good thing about Stevia based sugar is that it’s half the calories of normal sugar but it’s all natural. (i.e. Not weird Splenda type stuff that was invented in a lab).
I haven’t been baking or cooking very much this month or last. Blogging has gone much the same way. My weekends have been spent almost entirely outside soaking up the first of the good weather, and in reality gutting our new garden.
However I decided it would be wrong to let Easter pass without at least baking something, so I opted for Simnel Cake.
This Lemon and Blueberry cake has been on my list ever since it was on the front cover of BBC Good Food magazine for their March edition. They labelled it as the perfect Mother’s Day cake, but to me this cake says one thing – Spring!
It has hard to remember that spring is coming when it’s been raining all day, the winds are ferocious and snow is forecast for tomorrow morning. Yet there has been the odd day when the sun has broken through and you can almost remember what summer is like. This cake is for getting us through till then 🙂
It’s a long time till Good Friday, but these are too good to wait for! I have a special love of fruit bread, especially those spiced with cinnamon, so hot cross buns have always been a favourite of mine.
The supermarkets have been selling Hot Cross Buns since after Valentines Day, but I am yet to buy a single one. I made a promise to try to make more things myself. At Christmas I refused to buy mince pies and instead made my own – and I would never buy them again now. Why should it be any different for Hot Cross Buns?
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