Apfelstrudel, strawberry macarons, brownies, and lemon poppyseed muffins, plus cheese and crackers for those who want something other than sugar and carbs. There were several last-minute drop-outs so we ended up fewer than planned, which I thought would lead to plenty of leftovers, but the cakes were good and the guests hungry, so there wasn’t that much left afterwards.

Lemon poppyseed muffins for the family get-together tomorrow.

We’ve got a whole bunch of relatives, especially on Eric’s side, so there will need to be more than one cake. Once we started talking about it, every one of us had (very different) ideas about what to make, so we all ended up baking something.

Adrian and Eric will make theirs tomorrow, but to avoid stressing about oven times and who gets to use the oven when, I made my muffins today already, and Ingrid also will bake her macarons tonight.

Adrian and Ingrid both cook dinner once week. Ingrid saves favourite recipes on TikTok; Adrian sticks to trusted favourites.

One of his favourites is a simple but delicious pasta dish with oven-roasted cherry tomatoes, cream and mozzarella. I’ve always thought of it as an ordinary, everyday meal, but when I was shopping the ingredients today, I realized that with current grocery prices, it’s become a luxury dish. Even just the 800-900 grams of tomatoes cost over a hundred SEK, and the cream and cheese are another fifty SEK.

Adrian and Eric made a birthday cake for Adrian’s birthday yesterday, using the same recipe as two years ago. It’s delicious, again, but also huge, again. If it gets made again, we’ll use no more than half the amount of frosting in the recipe.

PS: When we had eaten half the cake, I weighed the rest out of curiosity – and it was 1.5 kg, making the whole cake a whopping 3 kg. That’s a heck of a lot of cake.

We’re subscribing to Linas Matkasse meal kits again, since spring/early summer, and liking it a lot. The whole setup is very convenient. Cooking an entire dinner with no planning and no shopping is such a time-saver.

Each week there are a lot of recipes to choose from, and we never struggle to find things we like. It’s fun to cook and eat recipes that we otherwise wouldn’t think of. We like some of them more than others, but haven’t disliked a single one. We’re saving a lot of the recipes for later reuse. A few have ingredients that might be hard to source elsewhere – such as dry falafel mix, or pre-prepared korma spice mix – but most only use stuff you can find in any supermarket.

The one thing that doesn’t always work out well is the heat level. Lina’s chefs like a lot more chilli in their food than we do. They send us these little sachets of chilli flakes, one teaspoon each. The recipes sometimes use the whole teaspoon, sometimes half. We use half at most – but more likely none, and replace it with sambal oelek. Flavour-wise it’s not quite the same thing as the flakes, because it’s got that vinegary touch, but I like it better in most dishes. Because the chilli in it is crushed, it makes for a smoother, more even result, with fewer fiery explosions in the mouth.

As a result, the little baggies of chilli flakes keep piling up, to the point where I’m struggling to find space for them in my spice drawer. I think I might take them to the office and try to give them away to people.

Crayfish party at work. I like crayfish, and fresh ones are even more delicious than the ones you buy in a plastic jar.

Before the party I spent the entire day in the office with my teammates and colleagues, and that was actually even more fun, after barely having left the house for anything but short walks and supermarket trips.

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.

Things you can do on office days, part 2: go shopping for chocolate. I’m all out of fancy chocolate, both filled pralines and plain bars. Chokladfabriken is on summer break but the little hole-in-the-wall shop in Hötorgshallen had what I needed. I found both the Tobago Cocoa dark milk bars that I loved at the chocolate tasting earlier this year, and also another brand of dark milk chocolate that I want to try. The Tobago Cocoa one was delicious, a perfect balance between chocolate intensity and creaminess and sweetness, but maybe there is something even more delicious out there?

We picked cherries, and pitted them for baking, jamming and freezing.

The area around us always looks like a bloodbath when we’re done pitting them.

I made a large sheet cake that went straight into the freezer, and my favourite crumble that went straight to our plates.

Ingrid’s most favourite burger ever, that she’s been looking forward to for a year. The sweet potato burger at Veg Machine at Aparaaditehas.