Ingrid has swim camp this week. Tomorrow is the last day and Ingrid wanted to make sweets to share with the other kids and the leaders.

These are traditional Swedish sweets commonly called dammsugare, meaning “vacuum cleaners”. Some say the name comes from the way they resemble old vacuum cleaners. Others claim it’s because these sweets function as vacuum cleaners because they use up all the leftover pieces of cake, the ends and edges and crumbs that would otherwise be thrown away in a bakery.

Dammsugare consist of an inner core made of cake crumbs, butter, some cocoa powder, and a few carefully counted drops of arrack essence.

That core is wrapped in a skin of marzipan. Traditionally, dammsugare just have to be green. Occasionally someone makes pink or white ones but they just look wrong to me! You can actually buy green marzipan in Swedish supermarkets, in convenient rolled-out sheets, because green marzipan is also essential for Sweden’s most popular cake, the princess cake. But we made our own from plain marzipan and green food colouring. Kneading the colouring into the marzipan was hard and boring work for Ingrid so she left it marbled, which looked quite decorative. The colour evened out with time so they became plainer overnight.

Finally the ends of each roll are dipped in melted chocolate.