Wyn Drabble: Please don’t mess with hot cross buns

Wyn Drabble likes good old-fashioned hot cross buns. Photo / NZME

OPINION

I’m definitely a coffee purist but, after reading about some of this year’s Easter offerings, I think I’m also a hot cross bun purist.

Let’s start with the coffee. Six or so years ago when Mrs D and I were driving across Tennessee, I felt like a coffee. We pulled into a roadside retail outlet and I had never seen so much coffee in one place before. A whole wall of coffee offerings.

There was coffee with hazelnut, coffee with chocolate, coffee with vanilla. Or salted caramel or butterscotch or salted pistachio or peppermint or coconut or mango or French toast or guava or chocolate chip cookie dough. There was even a pumpkin spiced latte! I would not have been surprised to see coffee with tadpole and turmeric.

But there was no coffee.

I am not making this up. On this coffee mega-mural there was no unadulterated coffee, which was exactly the kind I wanted. I put it down to what I shall call the American way. I’ve since learned that the USA’s National Coffee Association found in 2020 that some 80 per cent of US coffee consumers like to “customise” their coffee in some way.

Well, I’m thinking we may have caught the same bug Down Under. Call me old and set in my ways, call me a fuddy-duddy, call me a grumpy geriatric but I say a hot cross bun is a yeasty, sweetish bun containing some spices, a little dried fruit (including citrus peel) and a pale cross on top.

There is NO PLACE for chocolate or raspberry. Or tadpole with turmeric.

I’ve (briefly) scanned the internet to see what atrocities people have come up with this Easter. I found apple and cinnamon, raspberry and white chocolate, salted caramel, all of which are delightful flavours, but that does not mean they belong in a hot cross bun.

Wyn Drabble. Photo NZME

In Kaikoura, New World baker Steve Ogden created Lotus Biscoff hot cross buns, which earned him his second consecutive win in the Foodstuffs South Island Annual Bakers Competition. Lotus Biscoff is a Belgian spread with a salty caramel taste. Ogden’s win last year was for hot cross buns with a Pic’s Peanut Butter and caramel filling.

Across the Tasman, Woolworths came up with hot cross buns with Cadbury Creme Eggs embedded in them. You grill them in a sandwich maker and after you’ve let them attack your arteries, you clean up the mess from the sandwich maker and the surrounding walls (allow several hours).

The Australians also created Vegemite and cheese hot cross buns. The crosses are made from piped Vegemite.

If you think going savoury sounds bad, it gets worse. They also created cheese and bacon hot cross buns, the crosses on which were made of crispy bacon. That’s certainly a creative use of pig.

Someone also released a hot cross bun gin liqueur just in time for Easter and, if you think hot cross buns in liquid form is not silly enough, there was also hot cross bun icecream. I suppose it would make a novelty Easter sundae.

But the zany winner has to be … wait for it … the one created by an Australian restaurant. It contains (among other things) corned beef, onion, carrot, celery, dried kimchi, pickled chillies, and smoked oyster mayo. According to its creator, “it just works”!

Now, why didn’t I think of corned beef in a hot cross bun?

Okay, I admit to being a fuddy-duddy but I feel I have a genuine talent for picking trends. Next Easter, mark my words, it’ll be curly kale hot cross buns with lavender. They would go down well with a steaming mug of prune and anchovy coffee.

– Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.