Happy 46th birthday to me! I got cake. Eric made a variation on the redcurrant cake from my childhood, this time with gooseberries.

I’ve more or less managed to learn my age, so that I know what to answer when people ask instead of calculating every time, and then they yank it away again and I have to learn a new number!

Ingrid suggested a mnemonic for this year’s number. 4 and 6 make 10, or as it’s called in Swedish, 4 and 6 are “ten buddies”. That’s easier to remember than a random number.

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.

500 years since Gustav Vasa was elected king of Sweden, which ended the Kalmar union and made Sweden an independent country.

(Fancy cake by Ingrid.)

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.

Birthday fika for Eric’s sister who turned 50.

The adults sat and talked and ate semla. Those too young to appreciate sitting and talking had a Lego Masters competition. Those too young for Legos hung around and explored the world.

Here’s a rhinoceros that Adrian built.

13|37 turns 13.

After a few hours the introverts start taking off into various corners, while the extroverts could happily keep going all night.

When we moved back from London to Stockholm, one of the things we brought with us was the tradition of Christmas pudding. And mince pies, which I now see I have never blogged about either.

It tastes a lot better than it looks in a photo.

In England we bought them. Every supermarket in London had Christmas pudding, and if you wanted a fancy one, you got it from Harrods or Fortnum & Mason. Here in Stockholm we also started out with store-bought ones, from NK or The English Shop. But one year (I think maybe because NK stopped carrying them?) Eric tried making his own, and after that there was no going back.

Christmas pudding is served with brandy cream, which you can think of as a sweetened sauce béchamel flavoured with brandy. The pudding on its own is a bit too heavy and sticky, which the sauce helps balance. A hot pudding paired with a cold brandy sauce is the perfect combination.

There is a tiny problem, though: the sauce always runs out before the pudding. So then you buy more sauce – and then you run out of pudding before sauce. And then you buy another pudding. Which works if you’re in London with its abundant offering of Christmas puddings, but is harder when you make your own, which takes a couple of weeks at least if you want it to be really good.

This time when we ran out of sauce I tried hacking the process with a sweetened, brandy-flavoured quark mixture (no cooking, just stir it all together) and it was better than nothing but not as good as a proper sauce.