Christmas baking day with my brother.

The kids were here but had other things to do. I think they have kind of outgrown much of Christmas. Some bits are important still, but others matter much less than they used to.

It feels like my brother did all the hard work – the kneading and the rolling – while I just brought out ingredients and tools, put things in and out of the oven, and tidied away the dishes and utensils. He did volunteer for all of it, and he did go home with a nice stack of lussebullar as well as gingerbread cookies, so I don’t feel like I took advantage of him too much.

The lussebullar we made based on an online recipe described as “the ultimate”, with 294 votes (averaging at 4.5 stars) and 174 gushingly positive comments. There were no special ingredients involved – just preparation, and attention to detail. It starts with a pre-ferment the night before, has you soak both the saffron and the raisins (separately) etc.

In our not-very-warm house the dough needed a lot more time to rise than the recipe suggested, more like three hours instead of one. Once they were in the oven, they came out absolutely perfect: fluffy and tender. I agree with all the positive comments on the recipe and have already saved it for next year.

The gingerbread cookie dough was hard to work with at first, but settled down with time. Some sources advise trying to keep the dough cool; our dough worked better when it had time to warm up a bit. The cookies had a lot of flavour but were not quite as crispy as I would want, so the recipe is not yet perfect enough for sharing.