Midsummer picnic in Drottningholm.

I was kind of feeling like just having a Midsummer lunch at home, but everyone else wanted to at least go to some nice place, so a picnic it is. Drottningholm park belongs to Drottningholm palace, the home of the Swedish royal family, so there was no risk of any loud, crowded celebrations with line dances and lotteries and whatnot.

We sat in the shade of a giant, beautiful oak tree. Around us were trees and a couple of ponds, a few other smallish groups also having Midsummer picnics, and geese. Goose droppings everywhere. Step one when moving the picnic blankets to a new spot (because the sun caught up with us): remove the goose turds.

Strawberry roll cake for dessert, topped with extra strawberries marinated in lime juice and shredded mint leaves. The last two roll cakes I made (one of them a month ago and then an exact copy of it for the closing fika of our embroidery club) came out so well, and were so transport-friendly, that my thoughts immediately went to a roll cake for this occasion as well.

Roll cake makers all have their own tricks for how to keep the roll from cracking. The last recipe insisted that you needed to roll it up while it’s still warm. Some instructions online say you roll it up in a towel while it’s warm, let it cool, then unroll, fill, and roll again. I tried a third version this time, which was to let it cool entirely, under a moistened kitchen towel to keep it from drying out. And to flip it out from the baking sheet onto a kitchen towel (rather than parchment paper) and use that to help roll it nice and tightly afterwards. I don’t know how much of a difference the moistened towel made – maybe it would have been equally easy without – but there was no cracking whatsoever. Using a towel as support while rolling was very helpful.

Midsummer, with herring, new potatoes, and strawberry cake. No devilled eggs this year, since I’ve had quite enough of them with all the leftovers from Ingrid’s graduation party.

Strawberries are always kind of expensive this early in the summer, but the price this year was truly eye-watering. 90 kronor per litre in our local supermarket; 100 kr in Uppsala where my mum bought hers. That’s about 5 kr a bite. And I used to think that 50 kr a litre was expensive.

According to media, frost nights in May killed a lot of strawberry blossoms, and the cold weather after that delayed the harvest. There just aren’t enough strawberries.

Ingrid shared a Tiktok video joking about strawberry prices. 35 kr in 2015, 70 kr in 2025, and then 700 kr in 2030 with “we can set up a loan for you with automatic wage garnishment for the next three months to pay for these”.

We were gone in Italy during the Midsummer weekend, so we made up for it with a belated fake Midsummer brunch today.

All the traditions were present. Devilled eggs, pickled herring of various kinds, new potatoes, mini quiches, and a strawberry cake.

The cake may look ugly and sloppy and shapeless, but it is utterly delicious. Strawberries and an elderflower curd – sweet and tart and juicy. Recipe here; Dagens Nyheter is the source.

We missed midsummer, but I guess this could be annandag midsommar?

Everybody gets their favourites. Devilled eggs, mini-quiches with leeks and cherry tomatoes, silltårta. And elderflower cordial and strawberries of course.

If you think the amount of devilled eggs looks a bit over the top then we agree. But our first attempt at the filling came out too runny so we had to boil more eggs and add more yolks to the filling to make it firmer. They make for excellent leftovers for breakfast, though.

Our off-and-on-traditional midsummer outing with the Lennakatten museum railway to Marielund.

The weather was hot and the inside of the train like an oven, despite the open windows. The carriage filled up later, but wasn’t as crowded as it’s sometimes been in the past. I think they may have added more carriages to the train.

The train ride took longer than scheduled for some reason, so by the time we arrived and had unpacked the picnic, we attacked the food like a horde of locusts. I barely managed to get a photo of the cake.

Midsummer day’s picnic in Hammarskog. Lots of food, thereafter a bit of a food coma, and after that Ingrid and Adrian prepared quizzes for us. Ingrid won Adrian’s quiz, while I won hers.



(Adrian took this last photo, after decorating me with his cap.)

Midsummer lunch, with herring and eggs and new potatoes. And a decadent strawberry and elderflower cake.

In the evening, Ingrid and Eric watched the movie Midsummer. They’re the only two in this family who like scary movies.

Looking through yesterday’s photos, I realized that I was barely present in them, and then only as a small white figure in the distance.

Today I put on my Midsummer dress and my summer hat and took some self-portraits under the cherry tree.

Official Midsummer celebrations with maypoles and music such are not happening this year due to covid-19. We usually have a Midsummer picnic somewhere. And we don’t need an official celebration for that!

Most Swedes celebrate on Midsummer’s Eve. I didn’t have time to plan or prepare anything for yesterday, so we had our picnic today instead, at Hammarskog. Normally there would be a folk band and a maypole and dancing around it, but Hammarskog is a nice picnic spot without all that as well. There’s a wide open lawn sloping towards a view of a lake, and trees all around.


We had a nice and leisurely picnic lunch with silltårta and devilled eggs, and a strawberry and elderflower cake.

The cake was almost the same one as last year, because it was so delicious. (Here’s the recipe, possibly behind a paywall.) This year we transformed it into a Swiss roll, though, because Swiss rolls are more fun than cake-shaped cakes, and easier to transport. The marinated strawberry filling went inside the roll, and we spooned the elderflower curd on top of each slice, and then piled strawberries on top.

After lunch hung around for a while and didn’t quite feel like going home yet. Then we decided to play games. Apparently that’s a tradition at Midsummer parties, which I wasn’t aware of. Now I know. Femkamp, meaning a contest in five different “events”, is the most traditional form. We had no plans and no equipment with us, so we improvised with what we had and tried to find events that can be done more or less equally by all ages, even when wearing a somewhat impractical dress.

• Frisbee throwing with a lunch box lid
• Kast med liten sko, i.e. shoe throwing
• Pin the tail on the donkey (with a few post-its to mark the donkey on the lawn)
• Strawberry-and-spoon race
• Counting to two minutes (with your eyes closed)

Ingrid won every single one of them. But we all had fun, even though the thistles in the lawn bothered Adrian’s bare toes. Even my mum, who can be a bit stiff and “proper” sometimes, went all in!

The lunch box lid made a surprisingly good frisbee. It flew quite well, and even curved the same way a normal frisbee does.

Many of our neighbours apparently partied in their houses instead: there were a lot of noisy parties going on yesterday. People were getting drunk at 6 pm already, and continuing well into the night, some getting rather rowdy.

Midsummer. We usually celebrate with my mum, somewhere around Uppsala. (Christmas and New Year’s are at our place, Easter and Midsummer usually at hers.) There’s a handful of places that we alternate between. This year we opted for a ride on an old steam train (Lennakatten) to Marielund, where there is a traditional Midsummer’s picnic. None of us are interested in the singing or dancing around the maypole, but I like the train ride, and a picnic is never wrong.

This year we shared the train with a TV crew from the BBC who were filming for a documentary series called something like “Great train rides of Europe”. I’m going to have to look up that episode when it becomes available, to see what they made of it.