Bottle 4: Preserved Orange Peel

So this month instead of picking an ingredient and deciding how to cook it, I worked backwards by deciding what I wanted to cook and picking an ingredient that I could sneak into the recipe. You know, mixin' it up. Keepin' it real. Pokin' the puppy and shit.

Anyway I thought I'd try to stick to the Easter theme. Apart from the image of Jesus eating chocolate eggs whilst riding a giant rabbit, the first thing to pop into my mind was hot cross buns, a) because they're delicious and b) because hot cross buns are never really far from my mind.

I contemplated each of the remaining ingredients and although I have no doubt that sichuan peppers would make a rather interesting addition to a hot cross bun, I decided on preserved orange peel. Bit of a risky choice, as preserved orange peel is not at all like a candied orange peel, which is a traditional ingredient of the hot cross bun. Preserved orange peel, for those who are not Asian, has a strange, intense, salty-sour-sweet-bitter flavour, a little bit like a traditional chinese medicine shop smells like.

So during the week before the long weekend I set upon my kitchen with the fury of a furious person and baked me some hot cross buns. Pulling them out of the oven, I thought, hey wow, they smell good and they actually look like real hot cross buns. I win.

But wait. Whilst they made like Jesus and rose, the next day I awoke to find they had deflated into hard little hot cross scones that could have been used as weapons under the right circumstances. Still, I took some to work and attempted to distribute them at a meeting. What are colleagues for, if not to offload dubious foodstuffs that they themselves don't want to eat but also don't want to waste (think of the starving children in Penrith). Now they were hard to chew and needed vast amounts of saliva to assist with swallowing, but overall the flavour was good and that's got to count for something, right? Right?

Apparently I am not alone in my difficulties. Upon mentioning my baking attempt to Olivia (the Rosenator; she who got cranky that I didn't make enough reference to her in the last blog entry), she looked at me knowingly and asked, "did they come out more like hot cross rocks?"

Figuring they couldn't get any more stale, I packed up the remaining buns and brought them with me on my long weekend adventure up to the snowy mountains. And on Easter Sunday, by a river in the Kosciuzko National Park, four days after being made, the hot cross buns had their moment of glory.

Of course, we had to BBQ the shit out of them to make them edible. But hey, that's what we Aussies do.

Having eaten four of the six we figured we'd had enough, so like a number of my previously-loved items (clothes, books, ex-boyfriends) they got tossed in the fire. And it was damn lucky that they did because in doing so, I discovered an alternative fuel source to rival all others. That shit burned for hours. While logs reduced to ash around them, those hot cross buns retained their shape and and kept my tootsies warm and toasty whilst I ate a second breakfast of fried bacon to offset any dissatisfaction with the hot cross bun experience.

They may still be burning, who knows.

Hot Cross Fire Bricks

4.5 cups plain flour, sifted

2 x 7g sachets dried yeast

1/4 cup caster sugar

1 tsp each cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice

Pinch of salt

1.5 cups sultanas

Grated rind of 1 orange

2 tbsp preserved orange peel, finely chopped

1 egg

100g butter

300ml milk

Extra caster sugar and cinnamon, for glaze

1. Combine 4 cups flour, yeast, sugar, spices, salt, sultanas, orange rind and preserved peel in a large bowl. Create a well in the mixture. Do not fall down the well.
2. Place butter and milk in a small pan and stir over low heat until butter is just melted. Whisk in the egg. Pour into the well and mix into the flour mixture.
3. Knead on a floured surface until the dough is smooth, then cover in plastic wrap in a bowl and put in a warm spot for 45 minutes (dough will double in size)
4. Punch the dough for being so cheeky as to double in size when you weren’t watching it. Keep punching it til it submits and goes back to its original size, then knead til smooth.
5. Cut into even portions and shape into balls, lining them up in a large greased oven pan (3 rows of 5 buns fit perfectly in my pan), then cover with a damp tea towel or plastic wrap and put in a warm spot for 45 mins (they will double again but no need to punch them this time. They obviously are impervious to violence)
6. Heat oven to 220. Make a smooth paste from remaining flour and water and pipe crosses on to buns (don’t limit yourself to crosses though, you could pipe patterns, polka dots, even advertising onto your buns). Bake for 10 mins then turn heat down to 200 and bake for another 10 mins.
7. Dissolve 2 tbsp caster sugar in 1/3 cup water on the stove, adding some ground cinnamon. Let simmer for a few minutes then brush over the hot buns as soon as they come out of the oven.
8. Eat them straight away. It will just make your life easier.