Heavenly Chocolate Hot Cross Buns Recipe

Bold Bakers, I love hot cross buns because I grew up with them in Ireland around every Easter time they would be in every bakery and shop. But nobody told me back then that you could have chocolate hot cross buns. My mind is blown, I can't believe I didn't know about it until now and I'm gonna show you how you can make them. They are so delicious and just so beautiful and easy to make too. It's not a hard one, we don't even need a stand mixer. We're gonna do it all by hand in some nice big bowls. So the first thing I'm going to do is get my bread flour. Now you know, anytime I use bread flour, I don't use bread flour and in Easter dough I always explain why. I'm gonna start to sift this now. So the reason I'm using bread flour is because traditionally a hot cross bun does have a bit more of a chew than a bread roll does. It's quite chewy and it has a lot of kind of like bite to it. And that's what the bread flour gives you, it has higher protein so it gives you more of a chew. If you don't have bread flour and you want to use all purpose flour then that's fine, you can do that. My preference though is to do it the traditional way which is bread flour. Here I have some good quality unsweetened cocoa powder. So listen, the cocoa powder is the star of the show here so reach back into the back of your pantry, get the good stuff and use it for this recipe because it is well worth it. I like to use Rodel. Now to enhance the lovely chocolate flavor in our buns, I'm adding in some espresso powder. Now this is instant espresso powder, not just instant coffee granules because espresso powder is even stronger in flavor, it gives you more of an impact. It will dissolve straight away when it hits the liquid. Now if you're not a big coffee fan, I will say to you that they don't end up being coffee flavor, it just enhances the other ingredients in the buns. But if you are not so keen on it, you can leave it out. It just adds extra depth. Next we're going to add in a little bit of salt and we're gonna sieve all these ingredients together. If you watch a lot of Bigger Bolder Baking, you know I only pull out the sieve when I am sieving powdered sugar or cocoa powder because both contain moisture and can tend to be lumpy. So just give them a nice little sieve there. And it never hurts to sieve, like I feel like the generation of bakers now, myself included, I've kind of gotten kind of lazy and I'm just gonna throw it all in. But it is important to do these extra steps like aerating your ingredients, making a lovely soft bun. A fluffy bun even. Those are our dry ingredients. Next we are going to add in a little bit of butter. This is Cole's Butter. Now you can do this by hand or you can use a pastry blender, I like to do it by hand. Like you're making a biscuit or a crisp topping or a crumble, just rub that butter in between your fingers to get it nice and fine throughout your dough. It's good if the butter is cold, but honestly I don't like it to be too cold so I let it sit out for around 20-30 minutes before I need to use it. So I find it easier to work with. This little bit of butter all the way throughout your dough will create lovely little bubbly pockets and obviously enriching the dough too. Okay, lovely, after a few minutes of rubbing in, there's some lumps of butter, some big ones, some small ones, that's what we're going for. Once you've rubbed in your butter, now we're going to stir in our granulated sugar into our dough. Yasted doughs need sugar because it's food for the yeast. And here is my yeast. I like to use instant yeast because instant yeast can go straight into the dry ingredients and be mixed in just like any other ingredient. If you do use active dried yeast, it does have to be activated, it's an extra step. And I will put that information on BiggerBolderBaking.com in the recipe of how you can do that. It's easy to do. Give those a good mix together just to combine all the ingredients before we add in our liquid. So here we have our liquid. I have some warm milk. I like to use whole milk because it has more fat and more fat equals flavor. And then into this we're going to add in one egg. This dough is an enriched dough. It has everything that you would have, an enriched dough. It has butter, it has egg, it has milk. All that extra fat and richness really makes a difference compared to just a regular dough. So whisk those together and then just pour it into your dry ingredients. Now I'm going to start out with a spatula but then it'll get stuck in with my hands. You can just start to bring your dough together. As you can see I am doing this by hand. You can use a stand mixer that is totally fine too. It can make your life easier but I will tell you that so many doughs can be done by hand just like this. All you need is a little bit of extra elbow grease. So I kind of thought why not show you just how to do it by hand to make the recipe just you know a little bit more accessible to everybody. So I'm going to turn it onto my countertop now. I have some dry bits there but I'm going to gather those up. Now what you want to do on your countertop now is just knead this dough together. Now once it all comes together it's a good way for cleaning my countertop. So now this is what makes these buns really fantastic. Big old chunks of bittersweet chocolate bar. It's absolutely delicious, it's lovely and rich by good quality and you definitely will reap the rewards. And what I do is I cut big chunks because I want you to in every bun get a few big lumps of melty chocolate in there. If you use chocolate chips you know the quality is not always as great as if you use a chocolate bar. It depends on the brand. But also the chocolate won't pool and it will stay in one spot. So my preference is to buy a good quality chocolate bar and chop it up. So pop that onto the top of your dough and then this is where the hard work comes in. We're going to knead it throughout our dough. Like I said you can do this on the machine. I'm not going to backtrack now and do it on the machine but you can do it on the machine. Just knead it for a few minutes until the chocolate is all the way throughout and your dough has tightened. If you feel like you need to put a little bit of flour on your surface then do that. Sometimes I find that kneading without flour is actually easier. If you are new to bread making or working with yeast then definitely head to my website so I've got some articles and really great posts about how you can work with yeast, about sourdough bread, just about the how and the why of why we do things when it comes to bread. It really breaks it down step by step. Every bread is pretty much the same so you follow the same rules every time. So it's actually quite easy. And there we go, that being said, I ended up with a nice tight piece of dough just like that. So now here's the thing about this dough because we added in the cocoa powder and the chocolate chips, it's a heavier dough. So I'm going to put it in an oiled bowl. I'm going to swirl it around a little bit to coat it in that oil. The oil just helps it to glide up the sides of the bowl when it's proofing. You know a dough is a living thing and we don't want to cause it any stress, we want to make life as easy on it as possible. We're going to keep it warm, we're going to cover it with some cling wrap. We have greased the bowl so it's not going to struggle up the sides. And we're going to push it in a warm place. So a dough like this, something that's a little bit heavier and heartier, takes longer to proof. So normally you're looking at like around people say you know an hour, an hour and a half. This is going to take you around two hours. Definitely pop it in a warmer part of the kitchen and be patient and give it time. It will grow, it's not going to get huge because it's heavy, but after the two hours you should see that it's ready to go. So I gave my dough the full two hours in a nice snug spot. And it is looking very good. Look at that, you'll notice that it does puff up, but it doesn't get huge because it has all the bits in it. The one thing I would just say be very careful of is putting it on a proofing setting in your oven or you know turning on your oven and leaving it in there because of the chocolate. You do not want that to melt in the dough so just be careful of getting the dough too hot. We're going to cut this up into 12 pieces and we are looking for around 100g which is 3.5oz each. Oh 94g, there you go 3.5oz. This is my superpower if I haven't said that before. As a baker precision is really important to me especially when you have you know doughs that are all side by side. They all need to look uniform so that's why I always like to weigh them out. My first job when I came to the United States I actually was a bread baker in Tahoe and one of my jobs was we made hundreds of rolls a day and they had to be cut and weighed by hand. It was insanity, I can't believe that we were weighing it out, that we didn't have a machine that was doing them for us, weighing them for us, but every single roll was done by hand. So by the time I was finished there I knew exactly in my hand what a 2oz roll felt like and I was able to do 2 at the one time too. Which probably was the best thing I learned there. Now this is the fun part, I know not everybody loves doing this but once you get used to doing it it's really easy. Take your piece of dough, kind of bring all the edgy bits around to the bottom. Very little flour on your countertop here. I actually would recommend no flour on your countertop and then roll them. Put pressure on the table, that will put pressure on the dough to shape and to around and then you have a nice smooth ball. Smooth on the bottom, smooth on top, you're gonna have some chocolate bits coming out but that's okay. And then into your pan. And we're gonna do 3x4. So just bring the bits to the back, use the countertop, put pressure on and just like that you have a smooth dough. Like I said I spent a year of my life doing this in Tahoe and I would say practice makes perfect. Once you get the hang of it you'll always have that skill and it's just really easy to do. When you're doing bread rolls you don't get them smooth and they have creases. The creases don't disappear and they bake out that way. So just try and work on getting them as smooth as possible. And if that means you know putting a little flour down then do what works for you. But I find it much easier to do no flour when you're rolling into a ball. Now they're in our pan, make sure your pan is buttered so they don't stick in there afterwards. And now what we're gonna do is cover them up tightly with cling wrap again. Dough does not enjoy at this stage getting air at it. If it gets air at it it'll form a skin and then it can't proof or rise because it's stuck underneath the skin. So just be always aware of that when you're doing doughs like this. Sometimes when you're making sour dough you do want the skin, at this stage we do not. And then we're gonna cover it up again with a tea towel and we are going to let it rise for the second time. Now remember I said this is a sluggish dough, it's gonna need a little more time than a normal dough. So you're looking at around an hour and a half minimum. What we want to see during this time is that the buns actually proof into each other and that's gonna create something that we call batch baking. So they all proof in together and then we can pull them apart when they're done. Time for our second proof. So my buns have proofed. I gave them quite a bit of time because I knew that they needed it. You know you just have to go with the flow when you're making bread. If you get to your bread and realize you know what it needs a little bit more time, it needs a little bit more warmth, a little bit more care, then give it. Can you see the way I'm pushing down on these really soft buns? They're nice and light and airy now because I gave them the time to do that. The chocolate has not melted because we just had them at room temperature. They have proofed into each other which is going to make for beautiful batch baking. And they're gorgeous. And let me show you something. That you'll know when they're proofed. If you push in your finger and your indentation of your finger stays there that means that it's proofed. If you push them in and it pops back out then they'll need more time. So just factor that in. The last thing you want to do is just give them a little bit of egg wash to make them beautiful and golden brown when they come out. And I will say do this carefully. I hate when I see people egg washing and you can just tell by the force that they're doing it with their knocking out the air of their bread or whatever it is. Go gently and get all around. Okay that's it. They're lovely and glazed. Time to get them into the oven. Bake your hot cross buns at 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 200 degrees Celsius for roughly 25 minutes or until they're a lovely golden brown on top. So while the buns are in the oven we're going to make our icing. Now traditional hot cross buns have either a white icing or they have a dough that's actually piped along and then baked within the hot cross bun. But this is not traditional. So we can do whatever we want. And we are going to make a chocolate icing. So here I have some powdered sugar. Into this I'm going to add in some of my good stuff, my good cocoa powder. Get in there unsweetened. I'm going to add in some vanilla extract. Lovely. I have two tablespoons of milk here. I'm going to add in just one and whisk it until I get the consistency that I want which is a stiff frosting because I'm going to pipe this after. If you feel like yours is too stiff then add a splash more milk but I would just say be careful because a little liquid in here will make it very runny. But just get consistency that looks like it is good to put in a piping bag and to easily pipe but it's not too runny. It'll hold its shape on top of the bun. Okay lovely I'm happy with this. I'm just going to cover this over. Set it over to the side for later when our buns come out and we can start to dress them. My timer went off so it's bun time. These look gorgeous. They are lightly golden brown on top. We don't want to go too far with these little guys because they're such small little buns. They really look fantastic. When they're hot from the oven I set them to the side and then I glaze them with some runny honey. This just gives the buns a lovely sticky top. You can also use a simple syrup or a golden syrup to do this. It's important to do it while the buns are still hot because it kind of soaks in. After a while when the buns have cooled down a little bit more you can go on with your glaze. I find the best way to glaze these is to go down in the one direction and then across in all the same direction rather than doing one at a time. You do not need a ton of glaze on the buns so just a little bit of pressure as you pipe. I'm all about tradition in my food around big holidays like Easter and Christmas. However I do also love to see a twist on something old that is now new again. So these chocolate buns are something I've never seen before and I think will make a great addition to anybody's Easter table this holiday. You can enjoy these buns any way you like. You can eat them straight from the tray while they're still hot. Or you can cut them open and smear a little butter on the inside. And also a cup of coffee on the side never hurt. This chocolate hot crossbond is next level. It is coming down with lumps of chocolate. The dough is so soft and it is absolutely delicious. I really hope you enjoyed this recipe. If you want to see more from me then stick around. I've got lots more videos and I'll see you back here again really soon.