Bake: Hot Cross Bun and Butter Pudding

If you walk into our house at any given point at the moment here is what you will see: in the lounge sat at the dining room table is Phil, surrounded by a pile of books and study materials, head down, ipod in, steadfastly scribbling away at his study (he has a whole heap of exams for work coming up). Then if you turn and walk along the hall to the office, you will find me, also surrounded by a whole pile of books with a laptop (except no ipod this time – I study best in silence) scribbling away just as fast myself, preparing for my own heap of upcoming exams.

But, fear not, it’s not all hard work. We have plenty of breaks in between for cups of tea, and leftover Easter chocolate, and some fun ongoing mini projects, which can’t be shared just yet because of upcoming birthdays and significant event’s but will be covered in full in a Life post very soon, we promise :D.

So, during one of our many mini breaks today, I decided to be productive and use up the last few straggling hot cross buns which didn’t quite make it into our tummy’s during Easter (but have since gone a little dry and stale) to make a very quick and very simple Hot Cross Bun and Butter Pudding.

As you have probably gathered, this is a tweak on a more traditional English Bread and Butter Pudding, which normally uses stale sliced white bread, with added currents and peel. The lovely thing about using hot cross buns instead of bread is the sweet rich spice that the buns have over plain bread. Plus they already have the fruit included, so the recipe is even easier than normal (and I’ll be honest, it’s pretty easy in the first place!).

So, without further ado, here is my deliciously rich and sweet Hot Cross Bun and Butter Pudding. The perfect revision comfort food (and a good thrifty way of not having to ditch your lovely leftover buns) 😀

Hot Cross Bun and Butter Pudding

Ingredients 

6 hot cross buns, a bit stale and dried out is best

75g of butter, (enough to butter all the slices of Hot Cross Buns)

1 1/2 cups of milk

1/2 cup of double cream

4 eggs

1/4 cup  sugar

Zest of 1/2 lemon

sprinkle of ground nutmeg

1) Cut and Butter –  First things first you want to get a bread knife and slice your hot cross buns across, as if you were going to toast them. Mine were so tall I actually cut them into 3, so I had a top, middle and bottom piece, but this just depends on how chunky your buns are (he he he :D). Then butter one side of each piece of bun.

2) Lay out – In a large oven proof dish, lay out your slices of bun, with a fair amount of overlap between them. It doesn’t matter which side up the butter is really (see, I told you this was easy!)

3) Wet mix – In a separate measuring jug, add together your milk, cream, eggs, sugar and zest. Give them a good whisk together so they are thoroughly mixed.

4) Pour and Sprinkle- Pour your wet milky eggy mix over the hot cross buns in your oven dish, making sure they all get a good soaking with the mixture. Once it has all been poured in the wet mix should come up to around halfway up your layers of buns. You don’t want all of the buns to be sitting totally submerged in the wet mix because this will mean you don’t get a good crunchy crispy top (which is one of my favourite bits). Then sprinkle a good pinch of nutmeg over the top of the whole dish.

5) Bake – Some bread and butter enthusiasts would say that this is the part where you leave your pudding for half an hour before you bake it soak up all of the milky egg mixture, but we never find this to be necessary. So, preheat your oven to 180 °C  (360 F) and pop the pudding in for around 30 – 40 minutes, or until golden and crispy on top.

6) Serve – Serve with a splash of double cream and enjoy. We also think this is yummy with poached fruit, as the acidity of the fruit cuts the richness of the pudding a little. (As a naughty side note, it is also delicious cold if you fancy seconds! …. don’t worry we won’t tell :D)

So, that’s all there is too it. Very simple, very quick and very delicious.

Before we go, we thought we would share a funny thing which happened to us this morning.   Today was the day of the Edinburgh half marathon, which means that great swathes of the city’s roads were blocked off between 9am and 1pm. This mean’t that getting to church for 9am was always going to be a little tricky, so we thought ahead and did some googling which said that, if we encountered a closed road, one of the marathon officiants would be able to direct us on a diversion, so getting home didn’t seem to be a problem. Except that, when we came out of church having parked nearby, every single road around us was closed, and when we asked the officiants they explained that there was no exit at all from the part of town we were in, so we would have to wait till 1pm to leave. We didn’t really believe him if we were honest, as there are lots and lots of little roads and out of that part of town, so we went for a walk all around the square to see if there were any clever back routes we could take, but no! We were stuck! The runners were running around all 4 sides of the square and there was no way in or out. Having never been stuck in a little square in the middle of a city before we were a bit stumped at first, but luckily there also happened to be a coffee shop inside the blocked off area with us. So, lets just say, we drank a lot of coffee this morning and at one o clock, managed to get home. It was a unexpected little adventure in the middle of our otherwise very study filled weekend, and entirely our own fault because we should have done more googling. But still, what a very odd morning it was indeed 😀

Happy Sunday everyone.