Easter. Always more questions than answers. Flesh becomes bread and blood becomes wine and the dead come back to life, or maybe Jesus just fainted because he saw the future and it was a chocolate hot cross bun.
I like chocolate and I really like bread but they are not natural bedfellows. When chocolate meets flour, you make cake. When chocolate meets yeast, you get Thrush.
When (and why) did these abominations hit our shelves?
The internet tells me that, while Christians have associated the spiced fruit version with Good Friday since the 1500s, heathens have only been able to buy the chocolate travesties since the 1980s.
For century after century, we were a species content with currants, cinnamon and citrus peel. But then – bang! Shoulder pads, Duran Duran and crimes against Easter-themed smallbreads. The world had changed and we wouldn’t understand just how much until we found ourselves outside a bakery in 2026 picking the pancetta from our hot cross buns.
I actually think the baker’s decision to pair his excellent traditional bun with blue cheese was a winner. Think of it as a grazing table for one. Dried fruit, dairy and carbs in a cohesive bundle that does not require the host to spend the next fortnight scraping squashed food off the floor. (Don’t get me started on cheese cutting etiquette at platter-based events. Seriously, who raised the undecorous monsters who think it’s okay to whack the tip off a shared wedge?)
Cheese and hot cross buns – sophisticated and interesting. Chocolate and hot cross buns – knows all the words to Toot Toot, Chugga Chugga, Big Red Car.
Chocolate hot cross buns are for 5-year-olds and people who never grew out of fairy bread. They are also a symptom of our insatiable appetite for the next new thing and emblematic of our inability to say when.
Roast chicken and burnt butter should be dinner, not a supermarket chip flavour. Asparagus and cream cheese should be a sandwich, not an ice cream flavour on Ponsonby Rd (true story). Chocolate, salted caramel, spiced apple and all the other recent examples of hot cross bun subversion should be sent back to the bakery to have a good long think about what they have done to Easter.
It’s human nature to innovate, think outside the box and even reinvent the wheel. Blessed are the mince and cheese pie makers and the first people who put peanuts in slabs. But don’t you sometimes want to hit pause? What if the best thing since sliced bread is actually another piece of sliced bread and/or a classic hot cross bun?
The looming long weekend in April should taste like chocolate – eventually.
Tradition dictates that on Good Friday, you eat a toasted fruit bun slathered in butter for breakfast. On Easter Sunday, you eat two gold Lindt bunnies and a Cadbury Creme Egg before breakfast. Why? I’m not religious, but deep reading (see also Chocolat, the movie starring Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche) suggests delayed gratification is a big deal around this time of year.
Everything tastes better when you can’t have it all at once. Hot cross buns definitely taste better when you don’t treat Easter like it’s a children’s birthday party.
Do we blame the kids? Once, they were seen and not heard and occasionally sent out to sweep a chimney. Now they have underfloor heating in their ensuite bathrooms, can become vegans when they are 7, and never, ever have to wait a week for a new episode.
When anything is on the table whenever we want it – and if we don’t like it we can just change it – how will we know when we are satisfied?
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk. She has a Master’s in Gastronomy and (obviously) prefers a classic hot cross bun.