I regularly buy Vogels fruit bread for a breakfast treat. If I'm in Auckland on a weekend I'll make a point of visiting Connons in Kingsland for their Saturday/Sunday only 7-grain fruit loaf. So it's only natural for me to look forward to Easter's hot cross bun season. Like any product that in it's original, unadulterated form is full of delicious flavours & goodness, once the production ethos changes from making food for eating to making a product for maximum profit$, the whole taste / nutrition equation goes out the window, replaced by trying to find the minimum possible level that can be gotten away with & still call it a hot cross bun.

Yes, I like hot cross buns - if they're genuine & baked primarily as food to be enjoyed. I haven't bought & I won't be buying any of those pale, insipid, tasteless blobs of yuck barely even populated by dried fruit & miserly pinches of spice added, wrapped in plastic for long life & piled up on the supermarket tables without even a hint of the mouth-watering smell that defines special occasion baking.