Love Bites: Hot Cross Bun Bliss

Nowadays, you can buy hot cross buns all year round. Maybe you’ve always been able to, but when I was growing up we only ate them in the lead up to Easter and immediately after. Not strictly limited to Good Friday or Easter Sunday, but still a rare treat to be savoured. 

I would say hot cross buns are my favourite breakfast, but I don’t believe they’re exclusively a breakfast food. I also eat them: on bad depression days when it’s 2pm and I haven’t managed to eat anything yet; as a snack when I’m writing furiously before a deadline and don’t have time to stop for a bigger meal; in the middle of the night, when I wake up hungry and know food will help me fall back asleep. Toasting them fills the kitchen with a rich, fruity aroma, and the buttered, spiced bun all but melts in my mouth, leaving the tang of its chewy clusters of currants. It’s wonderful.

And the beautiful thing about being an adult is that there’s nothing to stop you from buying hot cross buns in June or August or November. Even now, I feel a thrill when I realise I can buy them whenever I want; stripped of their religious origins, just as I’ve shed my own Catholic upbringing, hot cross buns symbolise the autonomy I have over my own life. 

I do not take my agency for granted: how can I, after years of ignoring my body’s needs and wants? I can go to the bathroom without asking permission, eat when I’m hungry, leave a party and go home when I want to. I can toast hot cross buns at 11pm and eat them sitting on my living room floor – crumbs on the carpet be damned. To me, their buttery deliciousness tastes like freedom.