Waiting for the knäck to reach the right temperature. (knäck is a traditional Swedish Christmas treat.)

Adrian has a cold and is feeling tired and unwell, and he coughs all the time.

When I was a child, the home remedy for sore, scratchy throats was hot milk with honey. Adrian doesn’t like hot milk, but he does like hot chocolate.

I didn’t grow up with hot chocolate and never really missed it either. I think I had it on a few occasions in Belgium, but that’s about it. Up until a few years ago I barely knew how to make it. Scout camp has taught me, thought! This summer we set out to perfect and write down the ultimate recipe for scout chocolate. Which is not the same thing as cosy-Sunday-morning hot chocolate: scout chocolate should above all be warming and tasty but not too sweet so that the scouts guzzle it just for the sugar. The answer, and I’m not joking when I write this, turned out be 42. That is, 42 grams of cocoa powder and 42 grams of sugar per litre of milk. (To be fair, 43 might also work. But 40 was judged to be too weak, and 45 was too strong.)

Adrian’s preferred recipe for hot chocolate has 2 dl of milk, 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder and 2 teaspoons of sugar. Which makes it slightly weaker and sweeter than the ultimate scout chocolate recipe.

Our lussebulle-making sessions tend to be proper marathons. Eric makes a giant heap of dough, and then we roll a giant amount of buns, and fill the freezer with enough lussebullar to last us most of the Christmas season.

This time we made a smaller batch. The freezer is not so satisfyingly full as it usually is, but on the other hand the baking went much faster. And I think we all eat less sweets and sugar we used to (possibly with the exception of Adrian) so they probably won’t run as fast as they would have, even a year ago.

I tried store-bought lussebullar a week ago, and they barely tasted like anything. These home-made ones were better, but the saffron flavour wasn’t as strong as I remembered it. The colour looks good, but the taste is just kind of a bit weak. Either it’s nostalgia speaking, and the snow was always deeper when I was young, and the saffron buns more saffron-y, and the sun sunnier… or maybe we got lower quality saffron this year.

It’s lussebulle season!

I love butter. Especially melted butter, and frying things in butter. Broccoli, for example, fried in butter with garlic. Or pancakes, but without the garlic. And I loathe all the low-fat fake-butter sandwich spreads.

Some Swedish cookbooks have a recipe for pancakes where melted butter is added to the batter, with the argument that you then won’t need to butter the pan. Why on Earth would you want to not fry your pancakes in butter?! I’ve tried that approach, and while it does lead to pancakes of sorts, the taste is thin and flat. Not doing that again. Give me pancakes that make my fingers properly greasy!

Cherry cake, for Friday fika at work tomorrow.

Store-bought fika is accepted, but everyone is always extra happy about home-made fika.

We’re holding a gathering for our extended families on Sunday, with the kids’ birthdays as an excuse. (Normally we’ve tried to squeeze it in between the two birthdays, but this year due to lack of planning it’s happening in November instead.)

Adrian wanted a brownie or a chocolate cake of some sort. I suggested an apple cake. Ingrid is craving a blueberry cheesecake. Eric has his hands full baking them all.

Cinnamon bun day is one of those made-up holidays introduced by some marketing firm or industry body that I find rather ridiculous. But whatever, home made cinnamon buns are delicious!

Ingrid has gone from cooking dinner once a week to cooking dinner two or three times every week, plus occasionally baking. She’s passed that threshold beyond which cooking feels easy rather than scary. She can feel confident about picking up a new recipe and following it, or even just making something up without a recipe.

It’s Monday, which means it’s me and Adrian cooking dinner together, and him setting the direction.

One thing that Adrian likes in his food, and that I’m gradually also coming to like, is not peeling the root vegetables. I think part of it might be convenience, but he says he prefers the taste of potatoes cooked in their skins, and of unpeeled carrots. Even when he isn’t the one doing the peeling, he asks me if I could not peel the potatoes. He also says that broccoli stems taste better than the florets.

I can’t feel much of a difference in flavour, to be honest, but it definitely saves time, so I rarely peel carrots or potatoes nowadays. Roast potatoes are great with skins on. I even tried making rårakor – they’re sort of like flat, thin hash browns or rösti – without peeling the potatoes before grating them and it worked surprisingly well.

Something that felt so natural and obvious for so many years, even decades – of course one peels one’s potatoes! – was just an arbitrary habit, that I did just because I was taught to do it.

Monday is Adrian’s day to cook with me. Most other days, Ingrid wants to cook dinner both to earn money and because she is coming to enjoy it. Some days they actually argue about who gets to cook.