No one who knows Stockholm will be surprised I fell back in love with kaffe & kaka on a family visit there in October. But everyone who knows me will wonder how I fell out with the combo of coffee and cake in the first place.

Coffee and cake are in my blood. My grandfather Paul Young and his brother Phillip were Polish-Jewish bakers who specialised in what New Yorkers know as “coffee cake“, which is not coffee-flavoured cake but rather plain, cinnamon or nut cake you eat with coffee. My wife and I were in Sweden to visit Phillip’s son Izzy and his family. I dreaded telling my cousin I’d driven a wedge between “coffee” and “cake”. Izzy has had few relationships more enduring than the threesome amongst himself, cake and coffee.

First I blame the French, who convinced me that coffee was to be consumed after dessert but never with it. A Frenchman is at liberty to dunk a croissant in his morning bowl of café au lait. But wash a good pastry down with a hot coffee and he risks being taken for an américain – the last thing an American in Paris wants to be taken for. Foolishly I swore off café et gâteau, until I fled south to Menton and crossed the border into Italy. Free Italy.

Not so fast, said the disapproving glance of Luigi Biasetto when he saw me order a caffè shakerato and then eye the pastry display cases at the Pasticceria Biasetto in Padua. No to coffee with pastry. No to pastry after coffee. Yes to pastry before coffee. Yes to coffee after pastry.

The master confectioner may have interpreted my confused nod as an ascent but he took no chances, scribbling out his recipe for speculoos as a doctor would a prescription. Take two whenever you get an uncontrollable urge. Biasetto made an exception for these Belgian biscuits (or, as an americano would say, cookies), insisting the quattro spezie (“four spices” – pepper, nutmeg, juniper, cloves) and cinnamon in his speculoos made them a good complement for coffee.

Within hours of arriving in Stockholm you become aware its residents view coffee without cake as something of a crime against humanity. Coffee shops and bakeries are everywhere. Throw a rock at a random window in this beautiful city and nine times out of ten you’re going to hit the forehead of a Swede either enjoying kaffe & kaka or, if it’s 3am, dreaming about it.

The culture gap between Italy and Sweden tested my faith in the future of the EU. I recalled a concert I attended years ago at the Teatro Communale di Bologna. At the interval (“intermission” to an americano) I was nearly crushed by a stampede of elegantly dressed Italians all desperate for a cigarette. The five minutes I spent in the smoking anteroom was enough to induce a coughing fit that spoiled the performance of the remaining Bach Suites for me, some 800 concertgoers and the visibly exasperated cellist Mischa Maisky.

At the interval of the piano recital we attended at the Konserthuset, Stockholm’s main concert hall, the mad dash was for kaffe & kaka. Never mind that it was past 8:30pm on a Sunday night. The Swedes were desperate for a fix of caffeine and sugar. They crushed up against the lobby bar, where the bartenders had already paired hundreds of green paper coffee cups with mini-cakes. Music lovers crowded around tables, refilling their green cups with brewed coffee poured from giant thermal carafes. No one seemed in a rush to get back to the music.

Grigory Sokolov looked irritated when he sat back down at the Steinway for the second half of his performance. Clearly he hadn’t enjoyed the interval as much as we spectators. What, no kaffe & kaka in his dressing room?  Aggrieved or not, the pianist couldn’t help noticing his audience was peppier than before, applauding with unexpected stamina at the conclusion of the concert and bringing the exultant Russian virtuoso back for six encores.

In world rankings for per capita coffee consumption Sweden’s only real rivals are its Nordic neighbours. The same is probably true for its per capita consumption of kanelbullar – “cinnamon buns” to the americansk. With only 80 hours to spend in Stockholm we made it a point to drag Izzy – or he us – to as many kaffe & kanelbulle spots as possible and push the statistics up a notch.

We began with the cheery and buzzy Café Saturnas, which is #2 on Lonely Planet’s list of 333 things to do in Stockholm. You gotta love a city where the second best thing to do is have coffee and cake. Saturnas’ renowned cinnamon buns (pictured at left) were enormous, as the guidebooks promised, but they were also bloated and bready. We much preferred the sugary twists and cinnamony swirls of smaller, tightly woven kanelbullar from such bakeries as Albert & Jack’s and Valhallabageriet.

As great as the temptation may be to try these buns fresh from the baker’s oven, for the ultimate kaffe & kaka experience you must go not to these bakeries but instead to one of the outstanding coffee shops they sell to: Drop Coffee for Albert & Jack’s buns or Mellqvist Kaffebar for Valhallabageriet’s buns. Furthermore, you may not want a cinnamon bun at all.

A kardemummabulle is just like a cinnamon bun only it contains cardomom, as its name suggests. Cardomon, with its lemony and peppery notes, has a long and close association with coffee. A traditional ingredient in Arabic and Turkish coffees, its warm flavour marries well with coffee, just as the spices do in Biasetto’s speculoos.

Kardemummabulle = coffee cake: No before coffee. No after coffee. No without coffee. Yes with coffee.