Community Traditions: Hot Cross Buns & Easter Bread

Throughout the year, our bakers provide our community and customers with sourdough and sandwich loaves, cookies, granola, pasta, and more. But our households have come to look forward to some seasonal favorites that our bakers have provided for decades, including holiday fruit cakes around Christmas time and fresh Easter bread and hot cross buns during Holy Week.

“Good Friday is rounded off by the wonderful hot cross buns provided by our Bakery,” says house leader Emily Gerhard. “We look forward to them every year.”

This was Natalia Avendano Torres’s first Holy Week in Camphill Village, and she said the bakers were all looking forward to making the hot cross buns. The process of braiding the Easter breads was much more difficult than she had expected, “but it was a lot of fun,” she said.

Karsten Rau sets freshly shaped hot cross buns on a baking sheet.

Natalia Avendano Torres and Jessica Duarte Sousa prepare to braid individual strips that compose our Easter bread loaves.

Freshly baked hot cross buns.

Photo by Corey Weaver.

Jessica Duarte Sousa and Miss Maria Charlotte Logan brush egg wash on Easter bread loaves in the Village Bakery.