Tropical Fruit-Filled Hot Cross Buns - Hill Reeves

Aloha! Happy first day of Spring from snowy New York. I'm sitting up in my bed, with just the glow my laptop and the orangey light from the snowy Queens street lamps illuminating my room. Come at me if you must, but I'm not ready to say goodbye to winter. I love the cold days that force you indoors to hibernate beneath piles of blankets with your (my) Corgi.

But it seems the spring chicken in me may have emerged just a bit this weekend. I say this because I did two activities on one day. I don't normally do this. One time Candice invited me over for dinner and I said no because I had plans to do something very dumb like go grocery shopping and I told her that I didn't have it in me to have a two-activity day. She still brings it up from time to time.

This weekend, though, I met up with my b(r)e(a)st friends at a beer hall to celebrate our pal Blase's "Match Day." It's a complicated doctor thing about residencies, etc. We ate lots of pierogis and drank Irish car bombs which, I learned, "taste good if you drink them really fast, but taste like crap if you drink them too slow." So I went fast, but I wonder if that's just a lie to sell more wildly-concocted drinks??

Then, I moved onto a second location at ten o'clock, normally my bed time or at least my settle into bed time to watch three episodes of The Grinder before I fall asleep and Netflix starts asking me if I'm still watching The Grinder. It was wild, you guys. Of course I woke up and got a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich from the deli across the street because there's almost no other reason to stay out late.

I was also inspired by the Spring (and my recent trip to Florida and my recent Thai cooking experiments) to cook some hot cross buns for Easter. Side note: couldn't it be hot crossed buns? I Google it every time and I vote for crossed buns over cross buns because I feel it grammatically makes more sense. Anyway, rather than pack these babies with the heavy-handed spices and orange peel, which is kind of reminiscent to me of when the people at Planet Money cooked a peacock that called for waaay too many spices, I went with some tropical fruit flavors. Hope you like!

Tropical Fruit-Filled Hot Cross Buns

3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup water
2 1/2 Tbsp active dry yeast
4 Tbsp unsalted butter
2 cups bread flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1 egg
1/4 cup sugar
1 lime, just the zest
45 g dried cherries, chopped
40 g dried jackfruit, diced
36 g coconut

For the Cross

3 Tbsp flour
2 Tbsp water
1 splash vanilla extract

For Glaze

2 Tbsp honey`
2 Tbsp water

Cooking Directions

In a small saucepan, heat milk and water to 110 degrees. Turn off heat and stir in yeast. Let sit for 5 minutes until a bit frothy. (If no froth or bubbles, try again with new yeast--yours may be dead!)
Melt butter and set aside. Sift together flours, salt, and nutmeg in a large bowl. Make a well in the center and add in butter, egg, and yeast mixture. Add sugar. Then add in remaining fruits and mix-ins. Mix well.
Knead your dough for 5-7 minutes using a mixture affixed with a dough hook or knead by hand on a floured surface for 12 minutes.
Place dough in a large bowl and cover with a clean kitchen cloth and let rise for 1 hour, until doubled in size.
Punch dough down and shape into 12 buns. Place buns on lined baking sheet and let rise for another 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Combine "cross" ingredients in a small bowl and then using a spoon or piping bag, pipe crosses onto each of the buns.
Bake for 20 minutes until tops of buns have browned. Mix together honey and water and brush on top of buns while still hot. Serve immediately or save for later, warming buns in oven before serving.