Pasha is an Estonian Easter dessert of Russian origin. When I was a child, we always had pasha for Easter – it was as much a tradition as eggs. Somehow we lost that tradition for many years, but now we’ve picked it up again. We usually go to Uppsala to my mum’s for Easter so she makes the pasha, but recently we’ve concluded that one or two days of pasha just isn’t enough, so we made another batch when we got back home.

The bulk of it is sweetened quark, fluffed up by adding whipped cream, but much of the flavour and texture comes from all the other ingredients: lemon peel, chopped nuts, finely chopped chocolate, raisins, candied orange peel etc. You mix it all up, spoon it into a mould, and then let it stand for a day to drain out some of the liquid. After a day you turn the finished pasha out of the mould.

I have a lovely hand-made wooden pasha mould with decorative designs cut into it. Did I take a photo of the beautiful pasha with relief patterns that came out of that mould? No… because we attacked it like a horde of hungry locusts, and before I could think of bringing the camera, there was nothing left to photograph. This photo is of the other pasha, made of the mixture that didn’t fit in the nice mould and that I put in a sieve instead. The photo doesn’t do it justice, although to be honest, pasha does taste better than it looks in real life as well.