Cardamom Lemon Sticky Buns

Each Thursday, Emily Vikre (a.k.a fiveandspice) will be sharing a new way to love breakfast -- because breakfast isn't just the most important meal of the day. It's also the most awesome.

Today: A new holiday tradition, even when there's no room for one.

In both my husband’s and my families, Christmas morning breakfast is as good as set in stone. At my husband’s we eat bagels (brought from New York by his aunt and uncle) with cream cheese and lox. With my family we eat a vegetable frittata accompanied in good Northern European style by an embarrassingly large spread of meats, cheeses, breads, and leftover pork cracklings from Christmas Eve dinner.

I wouldn’t try to change either option. What would be the point? Both are immutable from the perspectives of our families, and both are too good to change anyway. But, that doesn’t mean I don’t spend time each year daydreaming about what I might make for Christmas breakfast if I happened to belong to a different family.

This year’s daydream is where these sticky buns come in. They’re sort of a cross between julekake -- a fragrant and buttery Scandinavian cardamom bread -- and that lemon pull-apart bread that took the internet-world by storm a couple years back. The buns take the heady spice of cardamom and the sunny brightness of lemon and swirl them together. Literally! Swirl. And then glaze. With more lemon and just a touch of bourbon -- it’s the holidays after all. These are totally something I would want to eat for Christmas breakfast...if I belonged to a different family.    

Cardamom Lemon Sticky Buns

Makes about 16 rolls

Sticky bun dough

3/4 cups whole milk, just warm to the touch
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1/3 cup granulated sugar
2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
1 large egg, beaten
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cardamom (preferably freshly ground)
3 cups all purpose flour (plus more as needed)

Sticky bun filling, assembly, and glaze

2/3 cups granulated sugar
3 tablespoons lemon zest (from about 3 large lemons)
4 tablespoons very soft butter
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (replace 1 tablespoon with bourbon if you want a lemon-bourbon glaze -- and don’t you think you do?)
1 1/2 cup powdered sugar (or enough to make a glaze consistency)

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here.

Photos by Emily Vikre