To help me out I steeply modified a recipe from Jo Whitton of Quirky Cooking for Hot Cross Buns. Hers have egg and dried fruit and the mixture is also really sloppy.
These are my very modified babies before they went in the oven, as might be noted by the fact the crosses haven't melted yet.
I got some ideas of Jamie Oliver's Food Tube (of course it was from Jamie. I love Jamie. *cough* anyway...) and added both xanthan gum and psyllium husk instead of only one of the two. I switched choc chips for the dried fruit (Sweet William for those who can have soy, the allergy free ones from iherb for those who can't), and wished I had put in less cloves. But overall it tasted pretty good despite tasting suspiciously like clove zone.
I won't bother with my icing sugar mix since it didn't work well, but don't use just plain flour for the crosses - that is disgusting as I know well from last year. Use some icing sugar as well (50/50 plain flour and icing sugar). Don't add nuttelex like I did though, because it melts in the oven and the buns looked pretty stupid. But, hey, it tasted great. A couple of drops of vanilla essence gave it a better taste too. I used egg replacer as per normal. I don't know, my buns looked pretty stupid afterwards, but they definitely are an improvement on last year, as mentioned.
Next time I will let them rise in the buns rather than shape them after they have risen, because, surprise, surprise, they didn't rise any further. The chocolate kinda exploded everywhere too, so be careful when making.
(Well, it melted then stuck to everything that came near it, and made a jolly mess. It *looked* like an explosion though.)
As food tube suggested, I used a bowl of boiling water in the bottom of the oven to create a moist and warm environment for the buns to rise. It certainly seemed to work well for them. It also gave my oven a bit of a steam clean.
Because Jo's recipe seemed to think you needed to leave it overnight at least to get flavours other than cloves to permeate the mixture I added the zest of a second orange, figuring that I was altering the recipe so much it wouldn't matter if I did that too, and it might add the flavour I needed without the extra time that I didn't have. I couldn't taste the difference really, but it wasn't bad. Maybe it did mask the cloves a little bit.
Next time I also think I should make more glaze. It didn't go as far as I planned this year.
Also a side warning with this, they take far to long to make - so if you are Martha Stewart, you'll be fine, but for everyone else, either convince your boss that everyone needs another holiday on the Thursday before Easter, or clear your weekend and make them on the weekend before. They freeze okay, and if you're like me, and used to eating gluten free treats if you even get a treat it will taste amazing. Never mind those naysayers who think they would die without gluten. IMHO gluten isn't worth killing over. Yourself, or others to test if they actually can't eat gluten without it making them sick. Chances are if they aren't flipping between gluten and gluten free they really can't eat the crap.
If you happen to be reading this and can eat gluten and other crap* yourself but are making these for someone who can't eat gluten and friends, I just want to say you are a special person.
By the way, chocolate wise, Target and David Jones are selling Kinnerton eggs again this year, and Sweet William has bunny heads somewhere that I haven't found apparently. If you are inclined to gorge yourself on chocolate I hope those options help you out next year or tomorrow when you run to the shops to buy all the cheap chocolate. I also brought some Haigh's dark chocolate eggs, which were popular with a lot of people. :)
As for me, later this week I need to restock on cinnamon because not only am I out, but so is Coles apparently. I still have enough cloves though, because unfortunately, last time I used cloves I thought I had none, so I brought a new container of the stuff and I only use it once a year - so I now have two fairly full containers**.
*This is a term coined to represent all the foods I can't eat - FODMAPS, dairy, egg, etc.
**They were just 'full containers', but I used copious amounts from one container in the recipe as you may have noticed. Don't do what I did there. Use it up in apple crumble (or something else if you can't eat apples anymore because of the FODMAP content).
