Edited by Azizi Powell
This is Part II of a three part pancocojams series on Jamaican Easter bun.
This post presents the history of and other information about Jamaican Easter buns (also called "spice buns")..
This post showcases a YouTube video about Jamaican Easter traditions particularly around food. That video includes a demonstration of how that video host makes Easter buns.
This post includes selected comments from that video's discussion thread.
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2026/04/easter-bun-jamaican-tradition-recipes.html for Part I of this pancocojams series. That post showcases a YouTube video about Jamaican Easter buns and other Jamaican Easter food traditions. This showcased video includes a demonstration of how to make homemade Jamaican Easter buns (spice buns). This post includes selected comments from that video's discussion thread.
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2018/10/comparisons-between-united-states.html for Part III of this pancocojams series.That post presents some information about R. Kelly's 1996 R&B/Pop song "I Believe I Can Fly". That post also presents several Jamaican children's parodies of "I Believe I Can Fly" that include references to "Easter bun" . In addition, this pancocojams post compares those Jamaican children's parodies of "I Believe I Can Fly". with some United States children's parodies of that song.
The content of this post is presented for social and cultural purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.
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ARTICLE EXCERPTS
These excerpts are given in no particular order and are numbered for referencing purposes only.
https://seasonedskilletblog.com/jamaican-easter-bun/ "Jamaican Easter Bun Recipe (Spice Bun)" By Taneisha Morris, Mar 26, 2023, Updated Mar 20, 2026
"Jamaican Easter Bun, also known as spice bun, is a sweet spiced bread dotted with rum-soaked fruit, coated in a delicious honey-fruit glaze. Serve this Caribbean delicacy with your Jamaican Easter feast or as an anytime snack with cheese!
[…]
Jamaican Easter buns are sweet and moist with a hint of savoury flavour. They are a traditional fare for Easter and I can’t imagine the Easter holiday without bun and cheese! Once March rolls around, you can be sure to find supermarkets in Jamaica stocked with all kinds of bun. Of course, it can be eaten throughout the year but it’s a special treat during the holiday.
There are two ways to make Jamaican Easter buns; with yeast or with baking powder/soda. We are using the latter in order to make a quick bread. Make this once and it will be requested for every holiday because it’s the best Jamaican Eastern bun recipe!
Here’s Why You’ll Love this Recipe
So Delicious – this is moist and sweet, with subtle notes of warm spices. The rum-soaked fruit has sweet bursts of flavour that make this a mouthwatering snack.
Jamaican Tradition – it’s not a Jamaican Easter without a spice bun and cheese! This is a holiday essential.
Customizable – this recipe has many variations so make it to suit your preferences. (I have a few helpful suggestions for variations.)
Who Brought Easter Bun to Jamaica?
When the British colonized the island of Jamaica during the 1600s, they brought the tradition of the hot cross bun, a sweet spiced bread baked with raisins. The spice bun is the Jamaican version of the English hot cross bun."...
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Source #2
From https://wiredja.com/index.php/lifestyle/the-surprising-4-000-year-history-of-easter-bun-that-nobody-told-you-about "The Surprising 4,000-Year History Of Easter Bun That Nobody
Told You About" WiredJA News Team #2 Lifestyle, 31 March 2026
..."The Bun That Never Rots
Medieval English people were convinced that a bun baked on
Good Friday would never go mouldy. So they hung them from the kitchen ceiling.
Just … dangling there, above the family, year after year. The old ones would
darken and harden into something closer to stone than bread, and the family
would leave them up there — little blackened guardians swinging in the draught
— until the next Good Friday, when fresh ones went up and the old ones finally
came down.[3]
"They hung the loaves from the ceiling like
sausages. The bread would never mould. It protected against evil spirits and
illness until the following Good Friday, when it would be replaced."
The Queen's Contraband
Here's where it gets political. By the 1500s, the hot cross
bun had become so loaded with meaning — part sacred, part superstitious, part
Catholic — that the English Crown decided it was a problem. In 1592, Elizabeth
I's London Clerk of Markets dropped a decree: selling spiced buns was now
illegal, except at burials, on Good Friday, or at Christmas.[5]
Why? England had broken with Rome under Henry VIII. The
Protestant establishment looked at those cross-marked buns and saw Catholic
holdovers. Papist bread. The punishment wasn't jail — it was confiscation. Get
caught baking, and every last bun went straight to the poor.[5]
The English response? They baked at home. Kitchens across
the country filled with the smell of contraband cinnamon and contraband cloves.
Some got caught. Their buns were seized on the spot and handed to the poor —
who, one imagines, were not complaining.[5] The ban stretched into the reign of
James I. Didn't matter. You can't kill a bread that people believe keeps evil
spirits away. The bun survived. It always survives. And before long, it got on
a boat.
Chapter IV
Crossing the Caribbean Sea
May 1655. Seven thousand English soldiers wade ashore near
Spanish Town, Jamaica. They're part of Oliver Cromwell's "Western
Design" — a grand plan to smash Spanish power in the Caribbean that had
already gone badly wrong in Hispaniola. Jamaica's entire Spanish population at
the time? About 2,500.[6] The English took the island in days. Spain tried to
get it back, lost the battles of Ocho Rios and Rio Nuevo, and formally gave up
in the Treaty of Madrid, 1670.
With the soldiers came everything English. Language. Law.
Church. And food — including the tradition of eating spiced, cross-marked buns
on Good Friday.[7]
But Jamaica wasn't Surrey. Jamaica was 90 degrees in the
shade with humidity you could wring out like a cloth. It was sugar cane and
rum, allspice trees growing wild in the hills, and molasses running dark and
thick from the plantation mills. Jamaica wasn't going to make English buns.
Jamaica was going to make something else.
[…]
What the Bakers Did
The people who actually made the bread — enslaved Africans,
and later, free Black Jamaicans — took that prissy little English cross bun and
broke it apart. They threw out the cross. Scrapped the dainty round shape and
baked it as a fat, dark loaf. Swapped the honey for molasses, because that's
what the plantations produced by the barrel.[7] Some threw in stout. Some used
Red Stripe. They packed it with dried fruit — raisins, currants, candied peel —
and laced it with the allspice that grew in their own backyard, a berry that
somehow tastes like cloves and cinnamon and nutmeg all at once.[8]
[…]
What came out of the oven was denser than cake, darker than
bread, and didn't taste like England at all. It tasted like Jamaica. Sweetened
with the same molasses that had made plantation owners rich and enslaved people
miserable. Spiced with the island's own pimento. The Jamaican Easter Bun wasn't
a copy. It was an answer."
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Source #3
From https://jamdownfoodie.com/jamaican-easter-bun/ Delicious Jamaican Easter Bun Recipe: Sweet and Spiced
Delight by Yaniki Tucker (no publishing date given]
Jamaica is a primarily Christian nation and all Christian
holidays are held sacred there. Easter is no exception and the observance of
Easter starts as early as Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the start of Lent and
generally, people decide to give up one indulgence during this time. Many
people choose to give up eating red meat and chicken and stick with eating fish
and seafood. At the end of Lent, which is marked by Good Friday, people begin
the feast of Easter with a spiced bread dubbed Easter Bun and fried fish. The
bread is a sweet bread that is studded with dried fruit and heavily spiced with
nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and allspice. It is traditionally eaten with Jamaican
processed cheese but it is also very delicious with mild aged cheddar cheese."...
-snip-
This page continues with a recipe and baking instructions.
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Example #4
From https://www.keshiasakarah.com/blog-1/blog-post-title-three-n4k56 "How did easter bun reach the Caribbean?", May 28 [no year given], Written By Keshia Sakarah, Chef, Food Writer and Owner of Caribe’
"Bun and cheese is a staple Caribbean snack enjoyed by us at
home all year round but especially during Easter. With it being popular during
this time of year, I had to ask myself why and how did this deep, rich, spiced
bread become a favourite of West Indians.
The origins of spiced bun are not quite clear, however, it
is widely believed that bun and cheese was derived from English hot cross buns,
which were traditionally eaten by the British on Good Friday, with the cross
symbolising the crucifixion of Jesus.
The tradition eventually became a staple in Caribbean
culture, when English 'missionaries' brought Christianity to the island of
Jamaica in the 17th Century. Easter gradually became observed on the island
along with the eating of hot cross buns.
In true Caribbean style, over time, the snack was developed
and adapted where it was made into a loaf with the addition of molasses, spice
and sometimes malt or Guinness. Researching recipes and comparing spiced bun to
hot cross buns, I noticed the absence of yeast makes spiced bun feel more like
a dense cake in comparison to the buns which are essentially a sweet, spiced
bread. Check my recipe for it, super simple to make"
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This concludes Part II of this three part pancocojams series.
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