Hot cross buns!!

I've been looking forward to doing this with the Aj's as I have never made Hot cross buns before, and I was interested in learning how to create the crosses and what they are made of.  On the morning Alyssa had had a terrible nights sleep, so was still in bed when we started, I decided the best thing to do was to make the dough first thing, then distract them with breakfast and getting dresed for the day whilst they were set aside to rise!

We started of by measuring out the flour and adding the butter, then I got Arthur to 'tickle' the flour to rub the flour and butter together, I also helped with this as well as it's quite hard for him to do. Then we added the other dry products, once he had had a chance to sell the spices.  Then he confidently mixed the wet ingredients into the flour and stirred it all together.  Having an electric scale I thought it would be a good idea to show him the numbers when weighing and get him to look for a five when weighing 50g etc to introduce some number recocnigtion, which he seemed to enjoy!

Once the dough was ready we had to roll the mixture into 8 balls, however Arthur wasn't very good at this as he was too interested in playing and stretching the dough rather than rolling it, but he was having fun so I just rolled all the others till all that was left was his one.

As i've said it was time for breakfast and getting dressed (and mummy to clean up) whilst the dough was rising then I mixed together the paste for the crosses, and helped Arthur squeeze the shapes out using a sandwich bag as a piping bag.  Then it was all down to Arthur to brush with the golden syrup, which I had warmed in the microwave for easier use.  During all this Alyssa was still asleep, in fact she was still asleep when they came out the oven so she missed the whole event.  She did however get to eat one of the buns for breakfast, so I think she planned it that way all along!  They were very very big however compared to the usual shop bought ones, so in future I may make double the amount, or just be greedy and have large ones!!

Adding the spices

"tickling the flour!"

Getting stuck in!

Mixing it all up and getting messy!

Adding the crosses!

We did take a picture of the finished buns, but it seems to have disapeared from the files, but theyy did look and taste great! I promise!


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