CROSS COUNTRY

Labelled the best in the world, Yael Shochat’s hot cross bun recipe is all you need this Easter.

Israeli-born chef Yael Shochat didn’t grow up eating hot cross buns, but that hasn’t stopped her version of the Easter treat gaining celebrity status in Auckland, and around the world. Much like the family-style food she serves at her inner-city café, Ima Cuisine, these buns are generous and packed with warming spices – freshly ground cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, honey and currants – and garnished with an iconic vanilla-flecked pastry cream cross.

Ima Cuisine has changed locations three times over the years, but Shochat says she has been making these hot cross buns since she first opened in 2004. Their reputation grew slowly and organically, until 2018 when an airline magazine boldly labelled them “the best hot cross buns in the world”. Shortly after that, a video by a local news outlet went viral a few days before Easter, and hot cross-hysteria ensued. “About 200,000 people saw the video in a day,” says Shochat. “We came in the morning and there was a queue down the road, it was insane.”

The following year – armed with spreadsheets, round-the-clock staff and an online ordering system – the café sold 24,000 buns over six weeks. In the final three days before Easter, Shochat and her team worked around the clock, continuously pumping out buns for 48 hours. They fine-tuned their operation so that every 45 minutes, 400 buns would come out of the oven, the queue that had built like a wave would subside and another one would swell in its place.

Shochat says the buns freeze incredibly well and she encourages getting in early to avoid crowds or disappointment. It’s something she had been advising last year, well before New Zealand ended up in a strict lockdown over Easter, “Ima means mother, but of course no one listens to mum,” she says. Surely this year, more people will heed her advice.

53 Fort Street, Auckland, NZ; imacuisine.co.nz