This recipe is from Tim Allen’s Book - The Ballymaloe Bread Book and it will put you off store-bought buns forever. It’s a little bit of work but well worth the effort.
Hot Cross Buns
Ingredients
25g fresh yeast
1 Tablespoon castor sugar
50ml warm milk
450g bakers flour (assume high grade flour here)
pinch of salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1-2 teaspoons [...]

We have a lot of wild apple trees in our road and they were laden with ripe fruit so we harvested some for the larder. The plan was to process and bottle them all for cooking through the winter but some of them turned out to be quite nice to eat. The pigs will get [...]

We had some delicious roasted gem squash with dinner last night. I’m saving the seeds and hopefully we can grow some next summer. These squash came from a market so we don’t know exactly how they were grown. If they came from hybrid seed then plants grown from these saved seeds will revert to one [...]

Our garlic harvest was pretty modest this year. Considering the neglect it had to put up with I’m surprised we got any at all, let alone harvesting more than we planted.

Next planting we’ll definitely do better but here are a few lessons we’ve gleaned:

Prepare the bed well. Don’t just turn over some sod and shove [...]

Our rural road is about 5km long and has many “wild” apple trees growing along the roadsides. Presumably over the decades, children waiting for the school bus have dropped their apple cores and some have resulted in apple trees. While it’s unclear who actually owns the resulting apples, they do seem to go to waste [...]

We arrived home with three weaner pigs this afternoon. They are destined to be bacon, ham and salami in about six months. Names haven’t been decided on yet but they will be suitably food-related so we don’t get too attached.

Tonight they will stay in the stables (in their little straw house) and tomorrow they’ll go [...]

Back in October we planted some raspberry canes. A few months on they are doing really well - we have some small fruit forming and the plants are sending up new canes. We were originally concerned we’d have to lift the carpet to let new shoots up but it seems the carpet has rotted enough [...]

The easy way to preserve your best blackberries when they are fresh and juicy is to freeze them. Spread them out on an aluminium tray covered with baking paper and put in the freezer. Within a few hours they should be frozen solid and will easily go into a plastic bag. Free-flow berries can be [...]

This is our own recipe based loosely on the DYC vinegar recipe with some extra (not so) secret ingredients.
Lifeboat Farm BBQ Sauce
1 onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons of cooking oil
2 big tablespoons of caramelised onions
1/4 cup malt vinegar
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce
1 cup of tomato puree
1/4 cup of tomato paste
1/4 cup of finely [...]

The best shortbread recipe I know is in the Edmonds Cookbook.
Shortbread
250g butter, softened
1 cup icing sugar
1 cup cornflour
2 cups plain flour
Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Sift cornflour an flour together. Mix sufted ingredients into creamed mixture. Knead well. On a lightly floured board roll out to 0.5cm thickness. Shape into a circle [...]