This is a test. Not of the emergency broadcast system, and not involving questions about columns I've written to determine how popular I am. The last one flopped. Luckily, for me, my ego is still at least partially intact.

No. I’m conducting a test in my kitchen, and I’m going to share the details with you, whether you want them or not. If you don’t want them, stop reading now.

The test is all about cardamom. I've been hearing a lot about the spice lately, and have only tasted it once, as far as I know. No doubt it has been in some ethnic dishes I've had, but the one time I know I had it was in a manhattan at the Carriage House restaurant in East Boothbay.

Owner-chef Kelly Farrin makes a cardamom simple syrup. He starts with the whole cardamom pod and the process involves a mortar and pestle. Some simple syrups aren’t really simple at all. Farrin’s bartender, John Utley, makes manhattans, with a splash of the (not-so-simple) cardamom syrup, at the Carriage House bar. (Just fyi: I was off-duty when I drank that manhattan :-)

Anyway. Utley’s grandfather had a distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, and you’ll be hearing about that soon, when I get his story and write about manhattans and the differences between whiskey, bourbon and rye.

So, cardamom. (Sorry, my ADD always kicks in when I get manhattans on the brain.) Cardamom is a spice that grows in a pod. The cardamom pods contain a lot of seeds, but the whole pod, with seeds, is often used in cooking.

It smells pungent, maybe lemon-y, maybe smoky. I don’t know. It smells like cardamom, I guess. There are two types of cardamom: black, and green, and it’s most commonly used in Indian and Middle Eastern dishes.

Okay. So. For some reason I got it into my head I had to make a cardamom cake. Why? I have no idea. But I started picturing and taking a virtual bite of warm cardamom cake with a dollop of whipped cream, and the idea took hold.

It was hard to virtually taste it though, as I didn't even know what cardamom tasted like, but for in a manhattan where the bourbon partially overshadowed the spice.

There was one way to find out. I went to Hannaford in search of a bottle of dried cardamom. It ain’t cheap. The small bottle was $10.

I had Googled cardamom cake and come up with several recipes, one pretty simple, and I like simple. Not just because it's simple, but I'm something of a purist when it comes to flavors, and if I was going to make a cardamom cake, I wanted it to taste like cardamom, not orange or lemon, as some of the recipes called for.

Then I thought about the chocolate zuke cake featured in last week's column. You don't taste the zucchini – it just makes for a fluffy, moist cake. Brainstorm: Cardamom zucchini cake! Hello.

I still had the monster zuke Sue Mello had left on my doorstep last week. And now that I had the cardamom, I was set. I had researched flavors that go well with cardamom. One of them was cinnamon. One was black coffee.

As I was mixing up the batter I looked at the pepper mill on the counter. I love freshly ground black pepper, and I virtually tasted some of that in the cake.

So here ya go: Blend 1 stick butter or margarine, ½ cup oil, 1 1/2 cups sugar; beat in 2 eggs. Combine with 1 tsp. vanilla and ½ cup buttermilk (just add a tsp. vinegar to the milk). Blend, or sift together, 2 ½ cups flour, 1 tsp. baking soda, 1/2 tsp. baking powder, ½ tsp. salt, 2 tsp. cardamom, 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, ½ tsp. unsweetened cocoa, ½ tsp. fresh ground black pepper and blend all together. Stir in 2 cups grated zucchini, and throw in a splash of black coffee, left over from breakfast. Bake in a greased 9 x 12 inch pan for around 45 minutes at 325.

Because grated zucchini is so wet, I squeezed a lot of the liquid out – especially as I added the coffee.

I had decided I'd throw a couple teaspoons blood orange bitters into the whipped cream I planned to top the cake with, but when I took a bite of the cake, right out of the oven, I changed my mind. This cake is so-o-o-o good it doesn't need any other flavoring in the whipped cream. Just a little sugar and a little vanilla. I ground a tiny bit of pepper into it too.

P.S. When I went into Hannaford in Boothbay Harbor to get the heavy cream I ran into a woman in a big hat at the checkout counter. She was buying a New York Times. Being the shameless self promoter that I am, I asked her if she read the Boothbay Register, and more specifically, my food column. She gets the Register in New Jersey, where she lives, and she said she had, indeed, read the column. I told her about the cardamom cake I had just made, and that it would be featured in this week's column.

So here ya go, Missy!

P.P.S. During a brief texting stint this morning with Kelly Farrin, in an attempt to glean some of his vast knowledge about cardamom, and the simple syrup that his bartender blends with whiskey or bourbon in manhattans, he asked this: ‘What’s all this whiskey foxtrot talk?”

Hence the name.

See ya next week!