For the Card-Carrying Members of the Cardamom Fan Club: Buttery Shortbread with Coffee and Cardamom

I'm a relatively recent convert to the cardamom fan club, ever since I went to talk by Helen Goh and Yotam Ottolenghi after the release of Sweet and Helen mentioned that she never liked cardamom until she started grinding it fresh. From that point on, I started buying cardamom pods and grinding the seeds myself in a mortar and pestle instead of using pre-ground. And she was right -- it makes all the difference.

 

Samantha Seneviratne's cookbook The New Sugar & Spice is divided into seven chapters, with each one focusing on a specific spice or group of spices. There's an entire chapter just on clove and cardamom! Her recipe for "Buttery Shortbread with Coffee and Cardamom" was particularly appealing to me, because I love coffee in desserts. 

The very first thing I did was get out some cardamom pods and my mortar and pestle. The recipe specifies that you need "1 teaspoon cardamom seeds, from 20 pods (or 2 teaspoons freshly ground)." I was making a triple batch, so that meant I needed a tablespoon of seeds or 2 tablespoons freshly ground. I didn't stop to think if it made sense that a certain amount of seeds would double in volume after being ground -- if anything, I would have guessed that the opposite would be true. But I just eyeballed the amount of seeds I extracted from the pods and measured after grinding to make sure that I had two tablespoons of ground cardamom. This was actually pretty labor intensive (even extracting the seeds from the pods is a bit of a hassle) and it probably took me about 20 minutes to prep the cardamom, start to finish.

 

Once I had the cardamom ready, it it only took a few minutes to make the dough. I combined all of the dry ingredients (flour, powdered sugar, dark brown sugar, kosher salt, very finely ground coffee, and ground cardamom); added room temperature butter and vanilla; and mixed until moist crumbs formed. I pressed the dough into the bottom of a pan, froze it briefly until firm, and then baked it.

The recipe instructs you to slice the shortbread while it's hot, immediately after taking it out of the oven. I let the shortbread cool in the pan and then used a knife to separate the slices, as they had become lightly attached as they cooled. When these cookies were freshly baked, they were very crisp and crunchy. The flavor was overwhelmingly cardamom and the cookies were very fragrant. The cookies were also extremely buttery. The strong cardamom wasn't unpleasant, but these cookies are probably the most strongly-flavored cardamom food I've ever tasted, so you definitely need to be a fan of the spice to appreciate these cookies. I could barely taste the coffee -- and coffee isn't exactly a subtle flavor.

 

I think these cookies would have been much better if I had used half the amount of cardamom, both because the cardamom was so heavy handed, and also because I thought the coffee needed more of a chance to shine. Although the most disappointing thing about these cookies is that they became soft after a day or two in storage; the cookbook says they can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for five days. I enjoyed these cookies, but they were intense!

 

Recipe: "Buttery Shortbread with Coffee and Cardamom" from The New Sugar & Spice by Samantha Seneviratne.