I aimed for a photo of Nysse in the box. He wasn’t interested in posing.

Eric and I got a chocolate tasting experience as a Christmas gift from Ingrid and Adrian. We’ve had to reschedule it several times, for all kinds of reasons, but today we finally managed to make it happen.

I have to start by saying that Duane at Small Island Chocolates did a truly excellent job. Welcoming, knowledgeable, enthusiastic – he made this a really enjoyable experience. The tickets were sold through a generic “events and experiences” company so I was sort of prepared for a somewhat commercial and impersonal event, but this was the complete opposite. Several of the chocolate varieties we tasted came from Duane’s own chocolate plantation on Tobago, and we were offered pieces of nearly day-fresh batches of chocolate.

The far row had pieces of single-estate “bean-to-bar” chocolates made of cocoa from Tobago Cocoa Estate. A milk chocolate, then the same with added sea salt, then a dark milk, and finally a dark chocolate. To my surprise, I found the 58% dark milk chocolate the most complex and interesting one. I don’t generally like milk chocolate much – it’s too sweet and doesn’t taste enough of chocolate – and I was expecting the “dark milk” to be more “milk” than “dark”. But it truly combined the best of both worlds. (I bought two bars of it after the tasting to take home with me.)

The second row had adventurously flavoured chocolate bars, from white chocolate with cocoa and beetroot, through a chilli chocolate and a liquorice one, ending with a bar of 100% cocoa solids. I didn’t much like any of these, but tasting them with my full attention was interesting to say the least. The white chocolate wasn’t bad but really didn’t have much to do with chocolate. With the chilli chocolate, the chilli added heat but no actual flavour – once the chocolate melted in my mouth, the chilli heat was in the roof of my mouth rather than on the tongue, so it didn’t blend with the chocolate flavour at all, which kind of made it feel pointless. The liquorice chocolate turned out to contain not just liquorice but also salmiak, which gave it a chemical taste. Finally, the 100% chocolate had so much cocoa butter in it that my whole mouth felt like it was coated in butter, which was a distinctly unpleasant sensation. This was the only piece I actually spat out. Worse than liquorice, which is saying something.

The third and final row had truffles and pralines. The dark chocolate truffle was utterly delicious, and the pralines were not far behind. I guess the cream in the truffles and the ganache takes both of them into dark milk land, too – which kind of makes sense and explains why I like them so much.

(The lone piece of milk chocolate at the far left wasn’t left over because I didn’t like it, but because I kept it as my “palate cleanser”. Water is no good at rinsing out a coating of cocoa butter.)

The embroidery club actually happened this week! I was so busy embroidering that I only realized after we had packed up that I hadn’t taken any photos. So here’s a photo of one of the beautiful stairwells in Medborgarhuset, where the club meets.

I’m eating as much I used to, and barely getting any exercise (because commuting) but suddenly I’m hungry. I can barely make it home after work before. Today I didn’t; I was twenty minutes from home when I just couldn’t deal any more and had to buy myself a banana. The brain is supposed to use a lot of energy, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s all the intense learning I’ve been doing.

My new assignment is at the other side of town, and on a good day it takes me 50 minutes to get there. With all the train troubles recently, it’s often been over an hour. Twice a day. I’m spending up to 10 hours a week on commuting. There have been good reasons to be in the office during this first month but I really don’t want to live like this forever.

Plus it’s not even smooth and pleasant commute. The change at Stockholm City is a crowded walk through multiple corridors and up several stairs. And then we get extras like today, with “slippery tracks”. That usually means leaves or snow, neither of which can really happen in April, so I’m guessing a chemical spill of some sort.

I just liked the way it looked.

(The rip-to-open strip of a cardboard package happened to curl up in a pretty shape in the sun.)

Bought and planted some spring flowers for the porch, for the first time in several years, in yet another step to getting back to the way life used to be.

The first truly warm day this spring. Short sleeves, sandals, and lunch out in the sun. And several hours of spring cleaning in the garden.

Spring is not complete without a photo of Viburnum flowers.

This is the season when not a day goes by without me passing some part of the garden and being amazed about all the beautiful things emerging there. Truly the best time of the year.

I’ve missed the last three meetups of my embroidery club. First we were away skiing during the spring break; then I was away for a different kind of skiing on my own; then I was travelling for work. And then one meetup was cancelled due to Easter. I thought the next one would be today, but when I turned up, there was nobody there. Either I mixed up the weeks, or they shifted everything by a week instead of skipping Easter Thursday. The arranger was away on vacation so I couldn’t get in touch with anyone, either.

I had been looking forward to this for many weeks. If the embroidery club isn’t happening, I’ll make it happen. So I went home and had my own one-woman embroidery meetup in the sofa. Put on some music, poured myself a glass of glögg that we still had since Christmas, and asked not to be disturbed.

I’m working on a glasses case. It seems fitting, somehow, to embroider something for the glasses that I need for embroidery.