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.

I like to drink flavoured water with my meals. Sometimes I drink Adrian’s apple juice water. Sometimes that’s too sweet for me, so I make lemon-flavoured water for myself.

Observations:

One lemon can power a whole lot of water. Almost like perpetual stew: when the water runs low, I fill the carafe up with more, on top of the existing lemon slices. After a while the lemon starts dissolving, with individual cells floating around in the water, and that just makes it taste even better. It doesn’t last forever, though – after a while it loses its flavour.

Lemon slices make better drinking water than lime. Lime can initially taste nice but becomes bitter quite soon.

The peel also makes the water bitter. I cut off the peel and the pith from my lemons before using them for this. With luck I run across a recipe that calls for lemon peel but no lemon juice, so the peel goes in the food and then I only need to throw out the pith.

Busy days at work again, but I can’t skip lunch every day, so now lunch is something that I can prepare in 5 minutes and eat at my desk while barely looking at it.

Not for the first time, I wonder how people with larger and/or hungrier families manage to cook dinner. 500 g of pasta just barely fits in a standard strainer. I can just about fit noodle stir fry for four in our largest cast-iron pan if I’m really, really careful when stirring. It’s a good thing I no longer need to eat quite as much as I used to – I balance out Adrian’s and Ingrid’s appetites (Adrian growing, Ingrid going to the gym).

I keep forgetting my lactose intolerance. I do remember it when I’m doing my grocery shopping. But for some things there are no lactose-free alternatives, and then I just buy the normal stuff and plan to take a lactase tablet when I eat it. Yogurts, for example. There are very few lactose-free alternatives and none of them taste well. Or anything with ricotta cheese.

The problem is that when I get to actually eating these things I forget about the tablets. I’ve been eating normal yogurt for decades so I just do it on autopilot. And a few hours later my stomach feels like a balloon and my clothes literally don’t fit me any more.

Knowing that my waist circumference at this point is 4 cm larger than normal, I wonder if could you calculate the volume of intestinal gas from that, and then the amount of lactose that was digested by bacteria instead of myself.

I’ve been thinking thoughts of lemon & poppy seed cakes since early summer. Since May, even, I think. Dropping hints occasionally when Adrian has said he feels like baking. (He always ends up baking either mud cake or chocolate chip cookies.) And I still haven’t done anything about it myself. A basic cake batter takes, what, fifteen minutes? Twenty? It’s nothing. But I just haven’t been able to muster the energy it takes to start even this humble project. Starting things is hard.

Until now. I feel inordinately pleased by this small accomplishment.

I don’t eat fish often but if I go without for a month or so, I can get a mild craving for seafood. Ingrid is a stricter vegetarian than the rest of us (except when it comes to sushi because it is her favourite food) so I try to satisfy my craving when Ingrid is away.

I didn’t take a proper photo today, but I did photograph a cake recipe – the strawberry and elderflower one we’ve had for Midsummer a few times – to send it to my mum, in return for the redcurrant cake recipe. So I guess I could share those with you.

Redcurrant cake

Crust

• 125 g butter
• 75 g sugar
• 2-3 egg yolks
• 250 g flour
• ½ tsp baking powder
• 2-3 tbsp breadcrumbs

Filling

• 4 egg whites
• 200 g sugar
• 75-100 g hazelnuts
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• 500 g redcurrants

Cream butter with sugar. Add egg yolks one by one while stirring. Mix baking powder and flour and add to the butter mixture. Roll the dough into a ball, cover and cool for 50-60 minutes. Line a springform pan with the dough, leave a 5 cm edge. Sprinkle the bottom with breadcrumbs.

Whisk the egg whites. Gradually add sugar. Whisk for another few minutes. Add chopped hazelnuts and cinnamon.

Stir the redcurrants into two thirds of the egg mixture. Pour the filling in the crust. Cover with the rest of the egg mixture (either piping or simply spreading).

Bake at medium heat for about 1 hour. (We interpreted “medium heat” as around 175°C.)

The original Estonian recipe had margarine instead of butter but nobody misses that.

The also recipe called for “nuts” rather than specifying hazelnuts. Back then everybody understood that that’s what you mean when you say “nuts”. Locally grown nuts were simply nuts; exotic, fancy nuts had longer, fancier names. That may still be the case actually.

My mum was able to locate that old recipe for redcurrant cake and Eric was kind enough to make it for me. This, this is what the cake is supposed to be like! A deep crust properly filled with lots of redcurrants – three times as much as the other recipe! Meringue mixed in with the berries, and chopped hazelnuts as well. I had completely forgotten about the nuts but now that I can taste them there, I realize what a difference they make. And the meringue itself is slow-baked so it’s crunchy and crumbly instead of sticky. I’ll be holding on hard to this recipe.