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.

View towards Klara strand and Karlberg train station, on my way home after work.

The opportunities to photograph Lego building in this house are endless.

We’re renovating the roof. Or rather, we’re having it renovated. So there are two guys clomping around on our roof, noisily tearing it up.

The original metal roof, probably from 1973, is well past retirement age. It is uneven so water gathers in puddles. It has leaked at some point, and been patched at some point, and now we basically don’t trust it to keep us dry.

Hot and sunny. We’re not used to this kind of weather any more, after the cool summer we’ve been having! Watching the presentations and shows with the sun beating down on our heads was uncomfortable to say the least. We had two rounds of ice creams to cool down.

In the afternoon we relaxed by going on the cable car safari. There was virtually no queue when our round finished, so we went straight in again for a second round. And that was truly a lucky decision! As the day wound down, the animals became more active. On our first round we barely saw any of the big predators, hiding in the shadows. On our second round both the bears and the lions were out and about, almost posing for us.

At Kolmården zoo/park.

This time we’re here for two days so we’re taking our time, stopping wherever we want as long as we want, seeing all the shows we want to see, riding all the rides again and again.

In between the two days, we have a night at the Vildmarkshotellet, which for the kids is an experience in and of itself, rivalling the visit to the park. Hotel room! TV! Pool!

We visited our newest baby cousin and his family.

Ingrid, at home again after five days of scout camp.

In theory, in his mind, Adrian wants to play with his friends.

In practise, when the friend is actually here, Adrian mostly yells at her. They tried some games and activities but all fizzled out or ended in shouting. The one that lasted a bit longer with a bit more success was building Legos side by side. But not for long.

The town of Enköping has made parks and gardens their “thing” and they have a lot of beautiful parks. Today we drove there to visit a few of them. I didn’t get to see nearly as much as I had hoped because Adrian (not unexpectedly) was bored and tired most of the time and didn’t want to be there. I’ll have to go back again on my own some day.