Just a few photos this time.

Like perler beads but tiny.

Just a few photos this month.

Our 2nd year of making gingerbread houses. Ambitions were higher this year; no store-bought kits here any more! The kids and I designed our own houses and actually managed to assemble them all (which was not a given, considering how crooked some of the pieces were).

I don’t understand how people manage to assemble these houses with icing. We tried, and after 10 or 15 minutes it had still not set fully. So we scraped it all off and went back to last year’s method using melted sugar. Much faster and more robust.

I was so annoyed by the icing that I threw it all out, so we went back to store-bought icing for decorations. It doesn’t flow very well so it’s hard to get the lines nice and even. Next year I think it’ll be sugar for glueing but homemade icing for decoration.

Today our youngest cousin Arvid had his naming ceremony.

We had our traditional annual Christmas baking day and made gingerbread cookies and lussebullar and mince pies. All turned out delicious, as usual: each recipe has been tweaked over the years until it is so good that we cannot think of any way to improve them. The gingerbread cookies are seriously spicy, the saffron buns plump and fluffy and flavourful.

We’ve gotten a bit bored with just making the same old same old each year, so the saffron buns get more and more fanciful in design, and the gingerbread cookies more and more decorated. This year’s bun designs included Minecraft-themed picks, axes and hoes. Adrian joined us in decorating cookies for the first time (it takes some strength and dexterity) and made non-traditional designs – such as green blobs, and using the glaze as glue to stick cookies on top of each other.

Ingrid made me a clove orange. I hung it off my desk lamp. Much of the time it hangs there and is decorative and nice, but now and again something happens and it gives off a flood wave of scent.

We’re on our way to the bus stop, so we can take the bus to Kista, where we’ll have lunch at the conveyor belt sushi place, and the girls will see a movie (Inside Out) while I go shopping.