Rose Prince\'s Easter Baking Club bonanza

A week to go until Easter, and I am picturing the Baking Club’s many new members stocking up on ingredients for their seasonal buns and cakes. I had high hopes for the Club’s success when we launched it just over a month ago, but nothing has prepared me for the amazing reader response. Letters and emails reveal that a fantastic number of you love to bake. In fact it’s a buzzing community, if your tales of triumphs, tips, suggestions and yes, some failures, are anything to go by. One person’s good recipe can be another’s dud, for sure. When the Telegraph published the letters of a few clubbers who had been disappointed with the sticky ginger cake (March 24), for example, a huge number kindly responded in the cake’s defence. It’s exactly this kind of interaction we all enjoy; your sharp questions, even reprimands, and your great ideas. They are coming from all over the world: from Australia, Canada – one treasured message, from Malta, is a request for a recipe for a much missed-English tea cake. We’ll do it, I promise. In the meantime, here are three great recipes for Easter. First, hot cross buns. I well remember making my first-ever batch, mostly because I ended up a bit, well, cross. I had borrowed my mother’s copy of Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery, took a metaphorical wrong turn somewhere in the recipe and ended up with 12 raisin-studded pebbles. At the time I had little understanding of the foibles of yeast, but a second attempt a few years later, using the same recipe, vindicated the book and produced rich, spicily enticing buns, puffy and light. These were very different characters from those stolid little things in shops. Elizabeth David called sweet yeast buns “English institutions”, but agreed sternly that they could be “very stodgy ones, too, if you buy them from the bakeries…” She added that they should be avoided by anyone mindful of their weight. Oh, never mind that, Mrs D, this is Easter, a short festival of sweet and young things, and indulgence is essential. Simnel cake, with its peculiar décor of 12 almond-paste orbs (said to represent Christ and the Apostles), is a traditional Easter cake I have grown to love. Marzipan sceptics – and I know there are a number of you – will protest, so it is only fair to include, as an appeasement, iced chocolate cakes, decorated with sugared primroses and violets.