Country Living in Southern Africa

A lot of you have been searching for sour-dough hot cross buns and landed here lately! I hope you enjoy this recipe.

I love tradition, as I mention in this Instagram post below. Please give me feedback and let me know how your hot-cross buns turned out.

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A post shared by Liza M Roux (@countrylivingsa.byliza.blog)

If you don’t have a sourdough starter, you can follow the instructions to start one here. Step-by-step Sourdough

For my basic bread, water and salt sourdough recipe click here. Baking bread with sourdough.

Sourdough Hot Cross Buns

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of active, room temperature sourdough. (I fed mine an hour before)
• 1 cup of water
• salt to taste (half a teaspoon here)
• 5ml mix spice (I used the lovely speculaas spice that I got from my friend Linda from Our life in Kruger)
• 10ml cinnamon spice
• 1/4 cup of raisins (You can add more, I just have a little and I am trying to work with it sparingly until I can buy again. Rural living problems and you might possibly have lockdown issues too :))
• 1/2 cup of honey
• 1/2 cup of double-thick plain yoghurt.
• 5 cups of flour
• 1/3 cup of olive oil
• Additional 1/4 cup or more of flour to use in step 2.
• Additional tablespoon of sourdough with a 1/3 cup of flour and a bit of water to create a plain dough that will make the crosses.
• For the glaze you will need:
• 2 Tablespoons of coconut oil
• 2 tablespoons of honey

Method:

1. Mix all the ingredients except the flour and oil. Add the 5 cups of flour and combine well. Lastly, knead in the olive oil and leave the ball of dough covered at room temperature for 4-6 hours. It needs to rise, if necessary, leave it to rise overnight. At the same time, you can also make a small ball of dough to create the crosses. (You can also leave the crosses out and call them spicy raisin-bread buns ;))
2. Dust the dough with 1/4 cup of flour or more and form little bread rolls or buns. I made 8 large buns, but you can make them smaller to make more. Place next to each other on a flat, buttered or sprayed baking plate. Now take the small ball of unflavoured dough and shape tiny dough worms and press them flat to shape the crosses on the bread. Cover and leave to rise for 2-3 hours.
3. Bake bread in a pre-heated oven for 55 minutes. When placing the bread in the oven, simultaneously place a flat oven pan filled with water at the bottom of the oven to create steam.
4. Immediately after taking the buns out of the oven, paint them with the glaze, so that it can be slightly absorbed by the hot bread.
5. Let them cool and enjoy.

Remember sourdough will always be best on the day it is baked. It is not a shop-bought bread filled with preservatives, so it will lose some of its softness with time. Even though they are still delicious in the following days, they might not make it that far anyway… I store them in the fridge after a day or two.

Let me know how it goes? And feel free to ask me questions.

You are most welcome to share my recipe anywhere you like, but please credit my original recipe link. Be nice 😉