At my internship I've gotten in touch with my Swedish ancestry through a fellow intern, Stan (aka Sven). He can claim 50% Swedish ancestry whereas I'm only 25% Swede. However, this is enough to engage us in discussing Swedish culture and comparing notes on Swedish culinary creations above and beyond the Swedish meatball.

He mentioned one day a cookie his grandmother would make and how no one bothered to master the recipe. Grandma didn't write anything down so the actual recipe is lost. Nothing is ever truly lost, so I said I could probably track down a variant recipe of this long-lost cookie and see if I could replicate it.

After endless detailed questions on my part, and Sven going so far as to consult a cousin who supposedly assisted grandmother in making the cookies, I came up with the above treat. They are called "kringla" and I flavored these with a hefty amount of cardamom and gave them a light sugar glaze.

What is interesting about these cookies is how they are more like a cake, almost a cinnamon roll. In some variations from the Norwegians the cookie is transformed into a roll and is made into a spiral instead of a pretzel shape. Some recipes call to shape the cookie not as a pretzel but as a figure-8. Some recipes use buttermilk while others use sour cream. There are about 2-3 unique variations on this cookie recipe and I shall experiment to see which one I think works best. My next attempt will be to use the sour cream recipe.

There is also another variation on this where the cookie is more crisp. This is no ordinary cookie, having each Scandinavian culture and region do its own adaptation of it.

I fondly recall my dear friend Pibb with another cookie story. She was raised by a non-biological grandmother who was Swedish. She said at the holidays her grandma would make a special Swedish cookie and that she'd give me the recipe. I was so excited to finally get in touch with my Swedish heritage, to experience something truly "ethnic". When I got the recipe and read through the ingredients list and saw how the cookies were prepared, I started laughing. I had known the recipe all of my life, just by a different name, and assumed it wasn't Swedish at all since no one had ever indicated it as such. Small world syndrome strikes again.