Easter Sunday, with all its traditions. None of the traditions can be changed at all. Which is a bit boring, but I’m OK with that. Who knows how many more Easter celebrations I will have before Ingrid goes off and starts her own traditions.

Things that can be varied: What kinds of herring to serve. What topping to use to decorate the devilled eggs. What design to paint on the eggs. What pattern to use for piping the merengue on the pie.

We decorated Easter eggs at work, and ate Easter-themed fika. I also got a giant (on my scale) Easter egg with candy that I have no idea what to do with. This is my Active Solution-themed egg.

It’s Shrove Tuesday, which in Sweden means eating a semla.

Ten-ish years ago, bakeries started offering semla-inspired products, and the creativity has only grown since then. This year Spånga Konditori offers not just traditional semla and a lactose-free one, but also vanilla semla (which vanilla custard instead of almond paste), cinnamon bun semla (also with custard) and wiener-semla (in a croissant, with the almond paste mixed up with the whipped cream).

I went for the traditional option. Ingrid and Adrian wanted to try the cinnamon bun and croissant variations. We concluded that a plain cinnamon bun is better than the cinnamon bun semla, and that if you want to add anything to a croissant then chocolate works better than almond cream.

Christmas is almost here. Ingrid, Adrian and I decorated the tree today; Nysse watched with great interest.

Then I made mince pies.

In the past I’ve mostly stayed out of this project – Eric was always the master baker, and my mother sometimes came here for a Christmas baking session, so there wasn’t room or need for me to get involved. They always made it seem very tricky: the filling bubbled out of the pie, the edges didn’t stay closed. Either I was lucky, or I somehow absorbed their learnings by osmosis – my first attempt came out great. Not picture perfect – there was a little bit of leakage – but much better than I expected, based on watching them work.

Christmas party! As one of the newly-joined employees this year, I was roped into the party committee. Which really didn’t involve much more than a brainstorming session for finding a theme. After that, our new office assistant took over, because it turned out that organizing a party is one of her favourite activities, and she wasn’t very interested in offloading any tasks to the rest of us. Until this afternoon, when I got to hang up balloons and other decorations.

It didn’t look like much in strong lamplight but felt quite festive with added disco lighting.

And here’s my alien costume! There were a few more aliens in the party crowd, and three Edgar the Bugs.

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.