Your New Easter Brunch (Dessert) Favourite
Hot Cross Bun Pain Perdu, fresh ginger creme anglaise
🎉 Welcome to my newsletter, The Boy Who Bakes, a subscriber supported newsletter dedicated to all things baked. For more bonus posts like this one, filled with exclusive recipes, you can become a paid subcriber for the weekly newsletter, Second Helpings. It costs just £5 a month and as well as the weekly recipes that also unlocks access to the full archive of past recipes. To subscribe, to either the paid or free newsletter, click the link below.🎉
Happy Friday, welcome to Second Helpings!
For the first time since we moved into our new house I was able to open the French doors to our garden and enjoy a gentle breeze and whole lot of sunlight, spring felt like it truly had arrived. The French doors might be in poor shape, the garden a bit of a bomb site and full of weeds but it was still a nice moment, a changing of the seasons.
Another sign that spring has arrived is of course the annual arrival of hot cross buns. If you saw my free post this week then you already have my favourite hot cross bun recipe but what happens when you make (or buy) too many. I know that might seem like a ridiculous proposition, who has leftover hot cross buns? It might seem farfetched, but when the season starts to end I start to worry that I haven’t had my fill and I always end up buying a few extra and normally it’s a few too many. In the past I have used them make all manner of desserts from hot cross ice cream, a little like a brown bread ice cream, turned into sweet croutons to garnish various desserts and this year I went down a different route, I used the buns to make a type of pain perdu, a fancy name for French Toast. That dish is then served with a fresh ginger creme anglaise, turning a classic brunch dish into something more appropriate to the dessert course (although if you want to enjoy custard for breakfast I wont stop you).
Before we get to the dessert let me tell you about one of my favourite hot cross buns this year. I haven’t actually tried many of the offerings from London’s bakeries this year, but if you read last weeks post and read my thoughts on the newly opened Quince Bakery then I’m sure it will be no surprise that I am a big fan of their offering this year. I was so busy enjoying it that I forgot to take a picture, so I have borrowed Felicity Cloakes picture from her visit this week. Sidenote: Felicity always tries lots of London’s Hot Cross Buns and puts mini reviews up on her instagram, so should you be looking for a new version to try, Felicity has the info you need. The Quince version is so soft and tender, generously spiced and if you’re a fan of candied peel is generously supplied in this bun.
The idea for this dessert comes from Fallow St James, a restaurant in central London. They use leftover croissants and bread to make a very similar dish and I thought using hot cross buns would make for a fabulous version. To make the dish you start by making a bread pudding, which is unusual for pain perdu but makes for an especially custardy french. Once thoroughly chilled you can slice the pudding and fry in butter, serving with lashings of ginger custard.
This week, besides eating my fill of hot cross buns, I also sent off the final text for Small Batch Cookies; after many rounds of edits the book finally goes to the printer next week. I cannot wait to get the first physical copy back in a few months and I’m even more excited to get it in your hands, so you can get baking from it and make all the amazing cookie recipes the book includes. Before it went to press I did have one last job, to get a few people to read the book and hope they’ll give some promotional quotes for the cover. Publishers love to include blurb quotes, short snappy quotes from other authors/public figures telling readers how much they love the book, they’re supposedly a great way to encourage readers to check out a book. This means the book has now started to feel real, because people outside the core team have now read it, they’ve composed thoughts about it, it’s the first feedback the book has had. I am thrilled with the two quotes we included on the cover and I cant wait to tell you who they’re from and what they thought, but until the book is at the printer and changes absolutely cannot be made I will have to wait a little bit longer. As I was doing the final round of editing I also decided to bake a few of the cookies, a kind of last minute sense check, a reminder of the flavours, a way to get me in the cookie zone. One of the cookies I made, I probably shouldn’t say its name but lets just say it involves malt, salt and is a sable, is such a perfect cookie to nibble on, with a cup of tea, that it made for the perfect editing treat.
Dont forget the book is available to pre-order anywhere books are sold.
Full recipe is below for paid subscribers
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Boy Who Bakes to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.