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.

UPDATE: Penny University to pop down 30 July.

If you want to see a Londoner famous for his temperature control get a little hot and bothered, just tell James Hoffmann in the most noncommittal tone you can muster you thought one of his featured brews from Square Mile Coffee Roasters was “fine” or “okay”. Better still, tell the 2007 World Barista Champion that, upon reflection, you suppose his coffee shop in London’s Shoreditch, Penny University, “fills a hole”.

“Ambivalence,” says Hoffmann, “is a terrible thing”.

Conversely, saying you positively hate his prized Blackburn Estate coffee from Tanzania is likelier than not to make him smile and get his attention. A puritanical shrine to brewed coffee that deprives its would-be disciples of espresso, milk and sugar, Penny University is meant to provoke. And so Hoffmann will take a “definitely hate” over a “sort of like” any day, even if devotion and love are the rightful responses to this groundbreaking, unplugged, pop-up coffee shop.

Make no mistake, Penny U is a retail space built to showcase and sell coffees, Square Mile coffees to be precise. Fearing some might wrongly judge the quality of the coffees according to the expense of machinery used to brew them, equipment most can’t use at home, Hoffmann and his associate Tim Styles (above left), who runs the shop he helped design, have taken the low-tech route. They’ve eschewed £10,000 brewers in favour of three manual home brewers made by the Japanese glassware company Hario: the V60 paper-filtered pour-over, the TCA-Syphon (vacpot) and the woodneck cloth-filtered pour-over drip pot.

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By providing even water temperature and distribution for the proper measure of coffee grinds, these filter brewers help a barista produce a cup of great clarity and often sweetness that unmuddies the taster’s experience. For me, it’s easier to pick up the aroma and taste of hazelnuts in the Capao Chapada Diamantina from Brazil or red berry nuances in the Blackburn Estate than it would be in an espresso. You almost want to ask Hoffmann where he sourced the hazelnuts and strawberries, which is just the sort of naïve and deceptively simpleminded question he and Penny U baristas Styles and Tobias Cockerill crave.

Everything in the cup, notes Hoffmann, is “from the roasted seeds of coffee cherries. The spectrum of flavours when they’re ground and dissolved in hot water is unbelievable.”

I’m not giving up espresso and neither is Hoffmann.  But there’s no denying that as presented at Penny U the slow quiet of the pour-over and siphon brewing processes constitutes a spiritual retreat from the humming, hissing and clickety-clack of the typically frenetic espresso bar. Seated at the six-stool counter you find yourself possessing both the time and the inclination to ask Tim or Tobias about the coffee they’re methodically brewing for you. The baristas may be answering you but they’re talking to everyone in the shop. Soon you are exchanging thoughts with neighbours to your right and left. Conversation starts with coffee but strays easily away from it. That’s the coffeehouse experience.

You don’t need to spend much time studying Penny U to notice contradictions within its dogma. The coffee is said to be about the ingredient, not the brewer, yet the Hario coffee makers, on sale in the shop, are very nearly objects of worship. The results are said to be attainable at home, yet the care and precision of the accomplished baristas seems paramount – and irreplaceable. It’s a big part of the experience. Furthermore, the no-sugar policy is a great conceit. I rarely drink my coffee with sugar. I understand their wanting and even urging us to discover the character and natural sweetness of their coffees apart from – and uninfluenced by – the flavour of the sugar and, yes, the milk. But isn’t sugar dosage a coffee drinker’s prerogative? Shouldn’t he or she get to decide if a coffee roasted by Square Mile tastes better or worse with sugar ?

Hoffmann has good answers for these challenges and you may have a few of your own. Indeed you can’t very well have a “penny university”, as the estimated 400-500 coffeehouses of 17^th century London were known, without the certainty of a good debate. These haunts were so-nicknamed for the price of a coffee and the education that went with it.

An anonymous verse from that period went:

So great a Universitie, I think there ne’er was any

In which you may a Scholar be, for spending a penny

Penny University – 5 Redchurch Street, London EC 7DJ

If there’s any doubt the character of a Ethiopia Sidamo can cut through milk, El Beit’s blueberry muffin of a cappuccino ends it.

A few minutes later I received this facebook message from my sister-in-law Sharon Baumgold:

Please forgive my ignorance – how can a cappuccino also be a blueberry muffin?

Fair question. Guess I got a little carried away with myself. But there are aromatic notes suggestive of blueberries within many examples of Ethiopia Sidamo. Hints of black cherry or lemon may also detected. When this Sidamo’s aroma was extracted into a single origin espresso and then combined with the sweetness of beautifully textured steamed milk, the effect reminded me of a blueberry muffin. (Turns out I am not the first to make this association.)

You can buy Ethiopia Sidamo beans online from many leading roasters, including Zoka and Gimme in the US and Londinium and hasbean in the UK. In its cupping notes, Zoka makes its organic Sidamo sound even better than a blueberry muffin:

Blueberries fill the air, sparkling with hints of tangerine, ripe peaches and bakers chocolate in the aroma. At first taste strawberries and cherries welcome you up front as the juicy acidity tingles in your jowls, dark chocolate notes paired with the sophistication of brandy arrive soon after. The creamy vanilla mouth feel is both rich and lingering.