Chocolate Hot Cross Buns

By: Pete on 14:48:00

I wasn't 100% happy with the hot cross buns I did at the beginning of the weekend. The house has quite cold, so the dough didn't prove very well. As the weather was once again dire, I resorted to an indoor training ride, so did another batch of dough to prove while I was training, and the house was generally warmer, so I was hoping for better results.

For these, I omitted the raisins, and added an equal weight of chocolate drops instead (Gill doesn't like dried fruit). This worked OK, though I'd say that the chocolate flavour somewhat




over-whelmed the spices, which isn't really how a hot cross bun should be. Otherwise the prove was much better, and the dough shaped very well (again, applying the concept of 'surface tension' to the shaping resulted in some well-shaped rolls that went through the second prove with a good expansion, without going too wide and splodgy).



I won't do the recipe again, you can see if on the original post for Hot Cross Buns...you just need to swap out the raisins for an equal weight in dark chocolate drops. I would also recommend upping the amount of spaces you add by 25-50%, depending on how much you like cinnamon and nutmeg.