20.—Hot Cross Buns.
Take 1 quart of milk or water, 3 ozs. of yeast, 12 ozs. of moist sugar, 12 ozs. of butter, 1 oz. of salt, with sufficient flour to make a nice mellow dough.
Proceed the same as for tea-cakes (p. [24]), adding spice, currants, and peel to taste; weigh 4 ozs. for a penny, make a cross in the middle of the bun, wash over with egg, and prove. Spice, however, is very seldom used, as it tends to darken the buns, and thus giving them a poor appearance. An ingenious apparatus has been invented called a Patent Bun Divider, which greatly facilitates the making of these buns, and cannot fail to be of great service where large quantities of buns or cakes are required to be divided. All that is needed is to weigh 8 lbs. of dough, place it in the pan, and at one stroke of a lever thirty buns or cakes are divided ready to mould.