They're back, with traditional spices and dried fruit, chocolate, savoury varieties or other unusual styles - what's your favourite hot cross bun flavour? Photo: Illio Angharad / Unsplash
It's that time of year again when hot cross buns crowd the shelves at supermarkets and bakeries.
Each year recipes get more experimental, with flavours like rocky road, cheese, bacon and even Marmite.
Prices vary too - a pack of six buns can cost up to $39.
First Up asked people in central Auckland what makes a good hot cross bun.
One woman said it was essential to have "a bit of spice", and she preferred fruit over chocolate.
An American tourist told First Up she had never tasted a hot cross bun, because they were not sold in the US.
One man said he tasted his first hot cross bun of 2025 weeks ago from Auckland bakery Daily Bread.
Daily Bread hot cross buns were named the best in New Zealand from 2022 to 2024.
This year they have introduced a sour cherry and chocolate flavour.
Owner Patrick Welzenbach told First Up he wanted to add something new for 2025
"It's a very dark chocolate, so it's not too sweet. It gives a really nice round flavour - the sourness of the cherries.
"It comes out a little bit and gives you a little bit like a pep. So very delicious."
The sour cherry and chocolate buns were $25 for a pack of six, while the traditional ones were $22.
Welzenbach said the cost of producing the festive treats had been rising steadily - but for now they were not passing that on to customers.
"The butter price went up quite a lot. We are using like probably 500 kilos of butter per week, or more.
"For us, it's very hard, but obviously we can't always increase our prices, especially nowadays."
"So this year we decided not to increase the price for the hot cost brand, so it stayed the same like last year."
He was chief judge of this year's Great New Zealand Hot Cross Bun Competition.
And Nada Bakery in Wellington was the winner.
Welzenbach said he tried them and they were delicious: "They had a really nice balanced flavour. They had a super nice straight white cross. It was not too tall, not too flat."
Nada Bakery owner Michael Gray said they used a decades old recipe which his bakers had kept on fine-tuning.
"We make sure we're getting really nice, good quality fruit.
"We've got a mixture of sultanas, currants and mixed peel, and we're making sure they're nice and juicy and plump."
"It's about those spices that we're putting on there. And it's not just going 'hey, here's a bit of cinnamon let's put that in'. We've got nutmeg, we've got a little bit of pimento in there."
A hot cross bun flavoured brew was even released in 2023. Photo: Shortjaw Brewing
And those ingredients mean the buns were not so cheap to make, Gray said.
"We want to make sure we can let as many people enjoy what we love making, but we've also had to pass some of that cost on as well, one thing we're really adamant about in our business is we don't cut portion sizes. We don't cut quality.
"My father used to have a saying that 'the quality is remembered long after the price has [been] forgotten'."
Sarah Tabak and Ben Eyres opened Beabea's Bakery in Auckland's Westmere in 2023.
Their hot cross buns caught the attention of renowned New Zealand chef Al Brown - who says they were his favourite.
Eyres told First Up the secret was in the bread.
"The process we're sort of following is very, very close to a panettone, like they're Italian Christmas bread"
"You make your first dough, and then that ferments overnight.
"And then that first milestone is to hit the right pH and then you mix your final dough and then all the buns are hung upside down.
"If we don't do that, they're just going to collapse under the weight of themselves."
As for trying this at home, Michael Gray from award winning Nada Bakery in Wellington said no matter how closely you follow a recipe, hot cross buns from a good bakery were just better.
"It sounds like a really overused cliché, but it's the passion that goes into it.
"There is something about that passion, that technique, and the care that the baker takes to ... produce something"
"Remember a baker has studied their craft and their trade for many, many years to be able to really develop those skills."
He said bakers studied which different enzymes reacted and when to use a strong or weak flour.
"There is a science behind what our trade is."
Yael Shochat runs Ima Cuisine and Deli in downtown Auckland.
She had been making hot cross buns for years, but things really took off in 2018, when a food writer gave them a top review.
"She wrote there that we make the best hot cross buns in the world.
"And then the people in NZME heard about it and they did a little video story and then overnight 200,000 people saw the video.
"We got up in the morning, we opened up and there was a queue all the way down to Queen St. and we didn't know what hit us."
And through post-Covid tough times, Shochat said the hot cross buns had been a lifeline for her restaurant.
"The buns have kept me here and I'm very grateful that I have that 'cause I would be gone. I wouldn't be here - would have been gone three or four years ago."
"In the past, before Covid, people would say 'Oh yeah, you make the hot cross buns' and I'd roll my eyes because I do so much more than buns. I make everything from scratch, but since Covid, I'm like 'yes, thank you - come and get the buns. Thank you very much'."
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