Easter Saturday

In a few hours a food and chocolate eggstravaganza is going to unleash itself at Chez Nicholas.  I'm so looking forward to it. :)

The children are beside themselves with excitement about the Easter Bunny.  There was no Easter Bunny when I was a child (sob, I was so depriiiiived, wail).  We just got a shitload of chocolate from mumndad, with no bunnies mentioned.

Well, unless you count that my dad's name is actually Bunny, so technically there was an Easter Bunny, but not a pretend bunny that we thought was real... oh never mind.  Is late. Am tired.

The kids are so excited that getting them to sleep has been a long and tedious process (we have run out of phenergen).  At one point hubs threatened them...
"If you don't stay in bed then I'm going to wait for the Easter Bunny and we'll be having rabbit pie for lunch tomorrow."

They didn't get it.

:)

Hot Cross Buns

Made Hot Cross Buns yesterday.

Here they are just about to go into the oven.

I used this recipe from the BBC website with a couple of adjustments that I mention below.

Here they are just out of the oven and rather haphazardly glazed with golden syrup (after small pastry brush melting incident involving the microwave).

They are light and fluffy and melt-in-the-mouth.  Nothing like the stodgy rocks you get from the Supermarket or Bakers Delight.  I had No Idea HCBs could be this good.

Recipe Notes

•  The recipe says to use 1.5 teaspoons of rapid rise yeast, but not having a clue what that is, I used a sachet (7g) of usual supermarket dried yeast which worked just fine.  
• I used the bread maker to do the kneading and the first round of rising - on the dough cycle. 
• After the first rise the dough felt quite dense and heavy, so I put the oven on its lowest setting for a few minutes - warming it enough so that I could still touch the inside of the door, and put the dough to rise in there.  This also worked really well and the second rise took about 40mins and so did the third.  
• For the third rise (when the buns have been bun shaped) the  recipe says to put the buns into an airtight plastic bag - I skipped this and they worked just fine.
• I put the flour mixture for the crosses into a sandwich bag and snipped off a corner - instead of using a piping bag.  It works fine as long as you don't squeeze too hard.
• From start to finish it all took about 3 hours - most of which was rising (of course)