Swedish Sokerkaka (Sugar Cake)

This dense, spiced cake has become a staple in our home. It's so simple to make and uses ingredients you probably already have in your pantry:  flour, sugar, baking powder, dried spices, salt, eggs & cream. There's no butter to soften and no special order in which to combine ingredients -- you simply measure them, put them all in the same bowl and mix them together. I use a stand mixer, so from start to finish it takes me no more than 5 minutes to make the batter, pour it into a bund form pan and pop it in the oven.

The spice that the recipe calls for is one found in a lot of Swedish baked treats: cardamon. While I like cardamon, I tend to associate it more with savory foods -- our favorite Indian restaurant puts whole pods in its sauces and rice, and when I first tasted this cake I immediately thought *Chicken Vindaloo*. The second time I made it, I substitued cinnamon for the cardamon, which made for a delicious, lightly-spiced cake. The third time around, I used pumpkin pie spice (my husband's favorite).

Recipes for this cake abound on the internet. I used one from Beatrice Ojakangas' The Great Scandinavian Baking Book.