Adrian loves chocolate cake, and he loves raspberries, so for his birthday he wished for a chocolate and raspberry cake. We found a recipe for a fancy multi-layered chocolate cake with raspberry mousse. It took Eric and Adrian half the day to make it. Totally worth it, in my opinion: it was delicious.

Birthday coming up tomorrow.

That giant, IKEA-wrapped gift at the bottom is an air fryer. Adrian and Eric both like kitchen machines – pasta maker, ice cream machine, dough kneader… Adrian has been talking about an air fryer for months now. I think it’s due to all the ads on YouTube. It’s a bit of an odd birthday present for an 11-year-old, and really a present to the whole family rather than just him, but I know for sure that he’s the one who’s going to be most excited about it.

When I was a child, I always got this one particular kind of redcurrant cake for my birthday. I don’t have the recipe so I thought I would just google for something similar. Shortcrust pastry, redcurrants, meringue topping – easy, right? Nope. The end result was good but nothing at all like I had imagined and hoped. The filling was too sweet and didn’t have enough redcurrants; the meringue was waaay to sweet. I really hope my mum still has that old hand-written recipe somewhere.

Birthday get-together for my nephews-in-law.

Adrian had a small birthday party.

He’s been pondering for awhile now whether to have a party or not, and if yes, what kind? Now he decided to have a sleepover and Minecraft party with a few of his classmates.

He really is very undemanding when it comes to parties these days. All he asked for from us was pancakes for dinner. The rest he took care of himself, including messaging his friends to agree on times and get RSVPs.

They spent all afternoon playing Minecraft together. After the pancake dinner they went up to his room where they did I don’t know what.

For some reason they barely slept all night. A couple of his friends “couldn’t sleep” and also couldn’t shut up and let the others sleep. Still, they were surprisingly perky in the morning. After breakfast and some more gaming, they baked a mud cake together – Adrian’s favourite kind of cake.

In the evening he fell asleep on the sofa shortly after dinner. After I prodded him to move to his own bed, he slept like a log for nearly twelve hours.

Birthday boy opening his birthday presents, early in the morning, before school.

A much needed “new” phone to replace his old one which is not working so well any more. A Lego Ninjago set, a Sorgenfresser plushie, and socks with food patterns.

No, he did not get a bottle Glenlivet. We have a family tradition of reusing good-quality boxes for wrapping completely unrelated presents, especially hard-to-wrap ones. The Glenlivet box held the phone; the Sorgenfresser came in a box made for an iPad Air.

You have to be a little bit careful with this so you don’t send out misleading signals that lead to disappointment and tears instead of joy. A plushie in an iPad box only works if you’re quite sure that the giftee does not actually expect that box to hold an iPad.

Happy birthday to me! It turns out I’m now forty-three years old. I have learned by now that I’m forty-something. I still can’t keep track of the exact number of years, though, and have to do some mental arithmetics whenever someone asks. Funny thing, that. Eric could probably recall my age better than I do. Even Adrian can, I think, but he on the other hand cannot remember my date of birth. For him the age is more interesting than the date.

Forty-three is a great age. I’ve had about twenty-five years of adult life and I expect at least as many more, before I might start thinking of myself as “getting old”.

Eric made the lovely cake. It’s raspberry mousse and lemon frosting on a brownie base. Just the kind of cake I love best: light and moist and with a fresh, tangy, fruity flavour.

We have a teenager in the house. Ingrid just turned thirteen. I’m still trying to get used to this idea.

Ingrid’s birthday presents weren’t too photogenic. (Here she is doing homework instead.) The main one was a ticket to Hamilton the musical, in London, next weekend. She’s been quasi-obsessed with Hamilton for months, and almost knocked over the lights on the table as she jumped with happiness when she opened that present.

By the way, her class gets no specific homework as such. They just have tests and quizzes every week, so her study schedule is based on preparing for each such test. She likes the logical subjects – chemistry, physics, even ethics which they do as part of social studies – where stuyding means learning concepts and understanding how they relate to each other, and test questions can then be answered to a great extent by logical thinking. She’s not so fond of subjects where she just has to learn a bunch of random facts, like French spelling, or when the topic in social studies was the Jewish religion.

Tomorrow is Adrian’s birthday. He’s been incredibly excited about it and has been counting down days since it was more than 40 days away.

Eric was away travelling for work on his actual birthday, so we had a small celebration today. He cares as much about birthdays as I do, which is very little indeed. But we did have cake of sorts, and flowers and a candle.