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.

The many-hours hand-crafted pasha mould liner did its job well. Didn’t wrinkle or sag, drained well, and made the relief pattern stand out nicely.

Easter in Uppsala with my mum, as per tradition. She and the kids all like traditions and doing things the way they have always been done; makes me kind of restless to change something but I don’t really mind.

Herring and devilled eggs for lunch.

Pasha for dessert. We each have our own version, and while we all each both (because more pasha is always better) and like the other’s, we do think our own is just slightly better.

Lemon merengue pie after dinner.

And the painting of eggs, of course. Note which generation has been taught to straighten up and stop slouching, and which one hasn’t.

Ingrid, who’s the only one among us to regularly practise her craft, makes intricate little paintings.

Adrian focuses on fun designs. Body parts, and blue caterpillars.

My designs this year were inspired by the Desigual dress my mum was wearing, with black circular designs with eightfold symmetry.

It’s pasha season, but the cloth I used to line the pasha mould with went with Eric. (It was part of a juice strainer.) We can’t have Easter without pasha, so it is time to make a replacement.

Cordon Bleu, the kitchen goods store on Vasagatan, had not one but two kinds of muslin/cheesecloth. There is more of a market for this than I thought. I bought the smaller variety, 100% cotton, and my project for today was to sew a liner for the pasha mould.

It took forever. Literally hours and hours. It’s such a small thing – but that just means it has many small fiddly seams, and an awkward 3D shape. And all the seams needed to be enclosed, because we do not want bits of cotton thread in our food or between our teeth. And I must still be doing something wrong with my sewing machine because several times I did something that mucked up the tension on the bottom thread, and had to untangle it and re-do the seam.

But! Now I have a liner. I will be using it until the day that I die, to make it worth the effort. And then my children and my children’s children will be obliged use it until the end of their lives as well, until the cloth falls apart.

The pasha itself went much faster and easier.

Easter is behind us, but Easter food, just like Christmas food, generally lasts longer than the holiday itself.

I realize that I’ve never shared my recipe for pasha. Those of you who make your own probably have a recipe already, and those of you who don’t are probably not interested, but here it comes anyway.

150 g butter
70 g sugar

3 egg yolks
1.5 tbsp vanilla sugar

0.7 dl chopped almonds and hazelnuts
0.7 dl candied orange peel
0.5 dl dried cranberries
40 g dark chocolate (4 squares of Lindt mild 70%)

grated zest of 1 lemon

750 g quark, for which I use 500 g Kesella (quark with 10% fat) and 250 g Keso (cottage cheese with 2% fat) which I press though a sieve to break up the grains

3 dl whipping cream

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Cream butter with sugar. Add everything except quark and cream.
Add quark to the mixture.
Whip the cream and fold it into the mixture.

Painting Easter eggs, as per tradition.

Also as per tradition, Ingrid makes the most artistic ones, while Adrian makes the crazy ones. This year his eggs had body parts – a giant eye, an ear, a mouth.

Afterwards somehow the women ended up cooking dinner while the men snoozed.

Paskha – as good this year as it has been every year.

Painted eggs, and then herring and devilled eggs and potatoes for lunch, and paella for dinner, and paskha and a lemon merengue pie.

The same procedure as last year? The same procedure as every year.

The Easter witch tradition appears to be dying out. This year we weren’t visited by a single one, and our bowl of candy for appeasing the witches went uneaten.