Hot Cross Buns

One of the things I love about food is the way that different foods mark out the year, its changing seasons and its various festivals.  I particularly love cooking at Christmas and Easter,  partly because many of the things i make on these occasions are once a year treats: the rarity of mince pies, Christmas cake and simnel cake makes both the making and eating of them all the more exciting.

At Easter Hot Cross Buns are top of my baking list.  This year, with it being an early Easter, school only broke up yesterday.  And what could be a better way to start my Easter holidays than by rolling my sleeves up and throwing flour all around the kitchen. Whilst supermarkets stock very tasty Hot Cross Buns, I love the satisfaction of making them myself, even if it means that with the rising and baking time I don't get to eat them until half-way through Good Friday.  Today's batch only came out of the oven just before lunchtime!

Don't blame the cook!

Everyone who cooks knows that cooking is an unpredictable business.  A faithful recipe we have cooked time and time again to perfection doesn't come out as we expected it to.  You take your eye off the clock for one minute and a burning smell begins to emanate from the oven.  You take a beautifully-risen cake out of the oven, and when your back is turned it sinks.

But just sometimes it is not the cook's fault!

In Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House (1852-1853), a searing indictment of the English judicial system, the cook at the Sol's Arms, a tavern in the vicinity of the London courts, is unfairly maligned.