All the spice and nice of a hot cross bun, but in a speedy cupcake form.
Hot cross bun cupcakes are a quicker way to make hot cross buns. There's no need to wait for dough to prove and rise, you can just pop them straight in the oven and they're ready in less than an hour. Rather than pastry dough, we've topped these with little crosses oof marzipan, to keep them sweet. This recipe makes 14 cupcakes, perfect if you need something for the kids to take to school for a bake sale.
To make this cupcake recipe (opens in new tab), preheat the oven 160°C/325°F/Gas Mark 3 and line 2 deep pan muffin trays with 14 cupcake cases.
Add all the ingredients (except the currants and peel) into a large bowl and beat until smooth, don’t overbeat or the cakes will be greasy. Add 1 tsp of flour to the fruit to make sure they are all covered, this helps them not to sink in the cakes. Gently fold the fruit into the cake mix.
Fill the cases with even amounts of batter and bake for 25 minutes. Remove from the oven and brush with apricot jam, to give them a shine, and then cool in the tins for 10 mins before moving to a wire rack.
Once cold, roll out the marzipan to ⅛ of an inch thick and cut into thin strips. Place them in crosses over the cakes. The jam with help them stick to the cakes but you may need a brush of water in the centre of the cross when sticking the second strip over it.
Top tip for making hot cross bun cupcakes
If you don't like currants you can replace them with dried raspberries or cranberries, or chunks of chocolate or toffee. If you don’t have apricot jam you could always use marmalade instead.
Octavia Lillywhite is an award-winning food and lifestyle journalist with over 15 years of experience. With a passion for creating beautiful, tasty family meals that don’t use hundreds of ingredients or anything you have to source from obscure websites, she’s a champion of local and seasonal foods, using up leftovers and composting, which, she maintains, is probably the most important thing we all can do to protect the environment.
Hot cross bun cupcakes
