I Bake For Attention: Coffee, Cardamom, Pistachio Cream Cake

Well, the name is a mouthful. As is the cake! Gentle comedy.

You may have noticed my lack of posting in August, a holiday hiatus, if you will. The Swede and I have been halfway around the world, and back again, but we are both firmly at home now. I plan to do some traveling-related cooking in the near future, but for now, cake!

So, I bought some pistachios the other day, so I decided to try out all the pistachio recipes that I had been hankering after over the last little while.

First installment: pistachio cookies. Second installment is this epic, flavourful, crazy cake. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, and the colour scheme is weird, but damnit if it isn’t one fine piece of baking. I’m really surprised that it isn’t Swedish recipe actually, it covers one of the main Swedish flavours (cardamom) and one of the main Swedish food groups (coffee). Changing the pistachios to almonds would probably be delicious and make it a Svensk trifecta.

For the coffee, I just made a little extra bit of filter coffee in the morning, but instant coffee dissolved in boiling water would work just as well.

One of my boyfriend’s faves, and he doesn’t give out praise lightly!

Makes one large cake

From a James Martin recipe

Ingredients (I halved the ingredients for my smaller cake)

For the cake

200g room temperature butter
200g sugar
4 free-range eggs
3 tbsp strong coffee
The seeds of 8 cardamom pods, ground
250g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder

For the filling

250ml double cream
1 tbsp icing sugar
The seeds of 5 cardamom pods, ground
60g pistachios, roughly chopped or ground

For the icing

100g icing sugar
1 tbsp coffee

Method

Begin by prepping the cake. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and line a large springform cake tin. Grind the cardamom seeds.

Cream the butter and the sugar, and when light and fluffy, add in the eggs one at a time. Mix well in between each addition. Then quickly stir in the coffee and cardamom seeds.

Gradually fold in the flour and baking powder, and scrape into the prepared cake tin.

Bake in the oven for 20 minutes until risen and golden.

Leave to cool.

For the filling, chop or grind the pistachios. Then whisk the cream in a large bowl, and, when soft peaks form add in the pistachios and icing sugar. Whisk again to combine, until firm peaks are formed.

When the cake is cool, cut in half horizontally with a large bread knife. This was pretty nerve-wracking, but definitely doable!

Spread the cream filling on the bottom half of the cake and sandwich the two halves together.

Then make the icing topping by measuring the icing sugar into a bowl and slowly adding the coffee, stirring until you have a pourable consistency that isn’t too runny.