Braided Coffee Cake with Cardamom

This is what I think of as real coffee cake—not extraordinarily sweet and for some people not even a dessert. If you want it more cakelike, double the sugar in the dough and consider adding a couple more tablespoons of butter. But this is wonderful with a cup of coffee in the afternoon or toasted, with a little butter, in the morning.

With the food processor, this dough becomes quite quick to make; just keep the processing to a minimum. You want to avoid building up the gluten in th