Dr Gavin Ashenden, a former chaplain to the Queen, can always be relied on for a trenchant opinion in matters theological, but now he has ventured into the realm of baked goods. The burgeoning on supermarket shelves of a range of monstrous mutations bearing the name of that humble Good Friday comestible, the hot cross bun, could be seen, he observed, as “the devil at work”.

On a purely culinary level, I couldn’t agree more. Searching in vain for a nice plain HCB among the bewildering variety of flavours, each more sickly than the last, it is not hard to imagine Beelzebub’s chef tempting the legions of lost souls with a toasting fork on which is impaled a chocolate and salted caramel bun, mockingly marked with a pastry cross.

Dr Ashenden’s objection to the gussied-up, or “luxe” buns seems to be twofold. On the one hand there is the dissonance between the “indulgence” of the exotically flavoured buns and their decoration with the cross symbolising Christ’s death and resurrection. On the other, he suggests that food companies are profiting from the appetites against which Christian teaching advises us to struggle.

The hot cross bun is not the only confection to have undergone a grotesque make-over in recent times. The rot set in with fairy-cakes: the childhood favourite of a little sponge cake decorated with a dab of icing evolved into the cupcake – a grown-up “treat” of garishly coloured sponge topped with a swirl of lurid buttercream. There followed the cronut – a fried croissant-doughnut hybrid stuffed with flavoured cream, hailed by Time magazine as one of the “25 best inventions of 2013” – and its more recent cousin, the cruffin, or muffin-croissant cross.

These confections have in common the oleaginous mouth-feel and tooth-stripping sweetness that define “treats” for the modern palate. But even the “original” hot cross bun, that sturdy blob of flour, sugar, yeast, lard and mixed fruit and spice, has a complicated back story, involving pagan origins and the commercial exploitation of venal appetites.

Alan Davidson’s indispensable Oxford Companion to Food notes that the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all baked symbolically decorated small cakes as offerings to the gods. The Saxons offered buns marked with a cross to the Spring goddess, Eostre, from whose name “Easter” derives. By the 18th century, the Chelsea Bun House was besieged at Eastertime by throngs of customers whose eagerness to sample its hot cross buns was echoed a couple of centuries later by the long queues outside the New York bakery where the cronut was launched.

Even in the bible, the spiritual significance of food is accompanied by a certain earthy pragmatism about the urgent nature of human hunger, and the value of conviviality. The face of Christ has occasionally been observed on such everyday foodstuffs as tortillas and slices of toast, so perhaps it is not impossible to imagine that the symbol of the cross, even when presented in a context as incongruous as that of a chocolate hot cross bun ice-cream sandwich, might mark the start of a spiritual awakening for someone.

Meanwhile, we need to keep an eye on what is happening to Simnel cakes. A certain supermarket (which shall remain nameless) has been offering sponge cake imposters under the Simnel name. Is nothing sacred?