Category archive as homepage

I want to have a category archive as home page.

My dirty solution (and it works) now is:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Home Page
*/
?>
<?php
$homepage = file_get_contents('http://website/category/cat_name/');
echo $homepage;
?>

as a custom template, select it on a page and set that page as homepage.

The only downside (other than a greater load on the server caused by the file_get_contents function) is that the admin bar doesn’t show up on home page anymore..

Don’t tell me to use wp_query directly on the custom template, I want to set just the category archive itself, is this possible?

Thanks in advance. 🙂