Cardamom Buns with My Daughter

My mother is Swedish and made cardamom buns every Saturday when I was growing up. The whole house smelled like butter and spice. This April, my eight-year-old daughter asked if we could make them together.

We pulled out my mother's handwritten recipe, splattered and soft from years in the kitchen. We crushed the cardamom pods with a mortar and pestle, which my daughter thought was the best thing she'd ever done. "It smells like Mormor," she said. She was right.

We made the dough and let it rise under a towel by the window. Then came the hard part: rolling it out, spreading it with butter, sugar and cardamom, cutting it into strips and twisting each one into a knot. My knots were neat. Hers looked like little sea creatures.

They came out of the oven golden and sticky, sprinkled with pearl sugar. We video called my mother in Gothenburg and held one up to the camera. She clapped and said, "Perfect." She meant my daughter's.