Hot cross redone: UK retailers experiment with Easter favourite

Is nothing sacred? The hot cross bun, a spiced bun traditionally served with butter and a cup of tea, around the time of Good Friday, is modernising.

This year, a quick whip round the supermarkets will find you an embarrassment of alternative hot cross buns, flavoured with lemon curd, salted caramel or tiramisu. There are buns spiked with rhubarb and custard or Red Leicester. Head to Asda for a tiramisu version, Co-op for one cross-germinated with apple crumble.

Away from the aisle, things become even more experimental. There are hot cross bun doughnuts at doughnut specialist Cross Town. Fancy bakery Pophams has a croissant/hot cross bun hybrid. The Laundry in Brixton developed its own fejoa, ginger, stuffed honeycomb butter and crispy bacon one last year – “What’s not to love about something that’s kind of salty, crispy, merging with the sweetness?” said executive chef Sami Harvey. And it will be back on the menu soon. On TikTok, things are even more creative: the chef Nathaniel Smith, for example, conjures up a minted, smoked jerk lamb iteration with wild garlic ajo verde.

According to Meg Palmer, a cultural analyst at consumer insights company Verve: “For the past few years, there’s definitely been an emergence of the ‘basic’ elevations of the usual hot cross buns”. But things have “really ramped up” this year.

M&S arguably started this hybridisation, with apple in 2009. According to Sandy Tchilinguirian, M&S food’s hot cross buns product developer: “M&S has led the market on hot cross innovation and, due to customer demand, the range increases each year.” They are, for instance, introducing buns riffing on millionaire’s shortbread.

But hot cross buns are supposed to be old faithfuls – flavoured simply with citrus zest, cardamom, nutmeg and the like – aren’t they? In terms of all the new flavours, food historian and author of Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation, Dr Eleanor Barnett, thinks: “Why not! While Hot cross buns as we would recognise them date back to the 18th century … recipes are always evolving and this just adds to the fascinating long history of hot cross buns.”

Plus, adding cheddar isn’t the strangest thing that has happened to them: “Miraculous powers have long been attributed to them,” said Barnett. “They were hung from ceilings for a whole year under the folk belief that they could not go mouldy; others thought that they could heal stomach upsets.”

Harvey thinks its yearly short lifespan gives permission for the hot cross bun 2.0 to be extra-indulgent – and food culture in the past few years has been hot on that. According to Palmer: “The dial for what we consider a treat has had to shift massively”. She links it to the trend for viral baked goods, for instance with croissant hybrids, such as the cronut, the cruffin and the crookie, drawing snaking queues outside bakeries savvy enough to offer them.

While a hot cross bun loaded with chocolate orange has newness, so important in today’s food culture, the bun itself is a known quantity. Hybridising it is, according to Jacqui Parr, the editor of The Grocer online magazine, “a safer bet for bringing out a new range or developing new products than if you’re doing something completely new.

“In whatever form people decide to consume them today I think eating a hot cross bun this Easter is a fabulous way to connect to our ancestors and all the different meanings they would have had to people throughout history”.