Oh my. Sometimes a recipe just looks too good and you just have to make it.
We saw cardamom buns on some TV show a few years back, and the NY Times had a recipe. I have made them every few months since. I am not a super confident baker, but even I find these pretty straightforward, although you do have to give yourself a morning to allow for the rise times and all.
Think of them this way: Very much like cinnamon buns that everybody knows, but replace the cinnamon with a ton of cardamom and they are SO good.
There’s a bunch of recipes out there and they all seem to produce pretty similar treats — a dough that is structured and has a great chew, a ton of cardamom flavor, and an indecent amount of butter (as in, a whole pound box goes into the dough and the filling).
I use pre-ground cardamom because preparing the pods is a bear and I am sometimes willing to use a trick instead of the hardcore old-fashioned way. I think I use a little less butter in the filling than the recipe, and at the end, I make a wash out of an egg and a tablespoon of cream, brush the tops with that, and then sprinkle some more cardamom and a little bit of sugar across the tops of the buns.
They are best in the first day or two (the recipe I base mine off of gets us 18-20 buns) and I stick the rest in a bread box to get a few more days out of them. If you toast them for a few minutes they pop back so it works. And if you have friends with a sweet tooth, invite them over the taste the buns as they come out of the oven — they will love you and probably come over the next day too and see if they can cadge another bun or two from you.