Midnight Bakery Easter bun in 10 easy to follow steps!

Dough ingredients:
500 g plain flour
1 Tsp instant yeast
3 Tbsp green tea (either powder or leaves, or a mixture of both)
4 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
100 g good quality butter, cubed and thawed in room temperature
400 ml H2O or milk
extra plain flour
1 packet of red bean paste (you can get this in Chinese or Asian grocer, orrr you can make your own if you're really really bored or really really enthusiastic)

Method

1. Mix all dried ingredients together, that's the flour, yeast, tea, sugar and salt. Chuck in the cubed butter too.
2. Pour in liquid (milk or water) and mix all the ingredients together. At this stage, the dough is all sticky, but cast that doubt aside and keep kneading and rub in the butter into the rest of the dough. You could add extra flour if you like to reduce the stickiness but please don't overdo it. This process takes between 10-20 minutes.
   
3. Now the dough should hold itself and when you poke it with your finger, the indent springs back. Leave it to rest for about 3-4 hours.
4. Has it doubled in size? Good, now punch it down and knead gently very briefly (brief is like 1-2 minutes). Roll it out to a log and divide the dough to fist size. From this you'd get about 15 little fist-sized doughs if your hand is as big as mine.
5. Flatten the dough into disk. The practical way of doing this is just pressing down the dough with your palm until it's the size of your hand with your fingers spread out. On the centre of the disk, put a tablespoon of the red bean paste and then close it up by pinching the edge of the disk together. Turn it upside down so that the smooth side is up, round up the ball and put in on your baking tray or a cake mould if you prefer.
   
6. Rest them for 3-6 hours. I rested mine overnight.
   
7. Before you bake the buns, preheat your oven to 160 degree Celcius for 10 minutes and glaze your buns with milk. Be gentle at this stage.
   
8. Bake the dough for about 25 minutes. This is the part where you put up a wooden stool and watch it brown with a cup of coffee or tea. It's especially fantastic in winter or autumn! If you live in the Southern hemisphere, now is the time to do it.
9. You may want to decorate it with the traditional cross made of icing sugar and milk or chocolate like I did, but if I may suggest, the bread is great on it's own. The icing sugar crosses only adds extra sugar that you really don't need taste-wise.
10. Bon appétit!