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Good Friday hot cross buns
The spiced buns marked with a cross, with cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and currants, baked on Good Friday.

Spices for Good Friday hot cross buns
Hot cross buns are yeasted rolls with dried fruit, marked with a cross of paste, and baked with mixed spice (cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, ginger, allspice and coriander). In English tradition they are eaten on Good Friday, and a bun baked that day was said to keep for a year. The mixed spice of British baking is the lasting trace of the medieval spice trade, when cinnamon and nutmeg were luxuries and the church was a heavy consumer.
The spices
Written by the EveryMasala desk with AI assistance. Background: "Hot cross bun" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Nutmeg: Herusutimbul, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Allspice: Unknown author, CC BY 2.5, source
- Mixed spice: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
