How to make perfect cardamom buns – recipe | Felicity Cloake's How to Make the Perfect…

Outside of cardamom's native Asia, the biggest markets for this heady, aromatic spice are the Arab world, where the crushed pods are commonly used to flavor coffee, and the Scandinavia, where their content flavors sweets to accompany coffee. In fact, the average Swede is said to consume 60 times more cardamom than their American counterpart, mostly in the form of cakes, cookies and those gloriously sticky buns.

Kardemummabulle , which are usually shaped into elegant dough bows, are perhaps less famous internationally than the beloved cinnamon puff versions across the pond, but I prefer their smaller size and their more pungent flavor. Easy to make and fun to shape, they're also the perfect Easter holiday project.

Flour

Bread flour is so called because its high protein content helps gluten development, gluten being the thing that gives bread its springy texture, as opposed to the more delicate crumb of the average cake. Gluten also helps dough trap air; bread made with plain flour, for example, tends to be denser and softer. The brioche therefore places us in front of a dilemma: recipes based on natural flour have a softer crumb, but sometimes do not rise as well as those based on bread or even 00 flour (that said, many recipes, such as the one by Charlotte Druckmann for The New York Times, are American, and American plain flour tends to have a higher protein content than European plain flour, thanks to the different wheats involved).

I make perfectly fine buns with plain flour (Druckmann, Swedish baking blogger and author Martin Johansson); bread flour (Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson, Swedish food writer Leila Lindholm and Danish cook and author Bronte Aurell); and very finely ground 00 flour (Danish writer and cook Trine Hahnemann). But I like baker Sarah Lemanski's strong and milder flour mix, which she uses at Nova Bakehouse in Leeds (which comes to me courtesy of baking enthusiast and journalist Felicity Spector), and which seems provide a middle ground. If you only have one, though, don't feel like you have to rush out and buy the other one in particular; make just the same total weight of flour with it.

Baking powder