I was glad to still be invited to the Bergheden family Christmas, even though I am not really a Bergheden anymore.

I made puff pastry mini pies and an orange & saffron cheesecake. The first time in many, many years that I attempted a cheesecake. It took forever, cracked in the middle, but tasted delicious. When I offered Ingrid to decorate it, she jumped at the opportunity, and turned the crack from a bug into a feature.

The one thing on my Christmas wish list was a book with porridge recipes. I’m a fan of both traditional oatmeal porridge, and grain-based porridge-like savoury meals. The book seemed to have lots of inspiring ideas for broadening my porridge repertoire, for breakfast as well as lunch/dinner.

Here’s a luxury breakfast porridge mostly based on a recipe from the book, with caramelized banana and a peanut butter sauce. Somewhat simplified: you’re supposed to sprinkle a coconut crumble on top that you prepared in advance (I just replaced it with some coconut flakes) and the sauce was supposed to be made with tahini which I didn’t have so I used peanut butter instead.

The result looks fancy and tastes fancy but didn’t even take longer to make than an ordinary porridge. The banana caramelizes in minute or two, and the peanut butter sauce didn’t take longer either, so I got both done while the porridge itself was still cooking.

I like the taste of peanut butter but not the texture. It’s so thick that it’s difficult to distribute on the porridge. Mixing it with a teaspoon of water and another one of honey turned it into a sauce that was much easier to handle.

This is absolutely going on my breakfast recipe shortlist.

Christmas is almost here. Ingrid, Adrian and I decorated the tree today; Nysse watched with great interest.

Then I made mince pies.

In the past I’ve mostly stayed out of this project – Eric was always the master baker, and my mother sometimes came here for a Christmas baking session, so there wasn’t room or need for me to get involved. They always made it seem very tricky: the filling bubbled out of the pie, the edges didn’t stay closed. Either I was lucky, or I somehow absorbed their learnings by osmosis – my first attempt came out great. Not picture perfect – there was a little bit of leakage – but much better than I expected, based on watching them work.

The website that had a recipe for “the ultimate lussebullar” also had one for “the ultimate Christmas wort bread”. The former was so great that I didn’t even go looking for an alternative recipe, just went straight for this one when I found it.

Baking any kind of bread in this cold house takes a lot longer than what the recipes say. I now turn on the radiator in the kitchen, even when I’m not cold myself, so that I can set the bread dough to rise next to it. Otherwise it takes forever and I’m not even sure that the dough will actually rise fully.

The result was absolutely delicious – just as dark and moist and fluffy and flavourful as a good wort bread should be.

Christmas baking day with my brother.

The kids were here but had other things to do. I think they have kind of outgrown much of Christmas. Some bits are important still, but others matter much less than they used to.

It feels like my brother did all the hard work – the kneading and the rolling – while I just brought out ingredients and tools, put things in and out of the oven, and tidied away the dishes and utensils. He did volunteer for all of it, and he did go home with a nice stack of lussebullar as well as gingerbread cookies, so I don’t feel like I took advantage of him too much.

The lussebullar we made based on an online recipe described as “the ultimate”, with 294 votes (averaging at 4.5 stars) and 174 gushingly positive comments. There were no special ingredients involved – just preparation, and attention to detail. It starts with a pre-ferment the night before, has you soak both the saffron and the raisins (separately) etc.

In our not-very-warm house the dough needed a lot more time to rise than the recipe suggested, more like three hours instead of one. Once they were in the oven, they came out absolutely perfect: fluffy and tender. I agree with all the positive comments on the recipe and have already saved it for next year.

The gingerbread cookie dough was hard to work with at first, but settled down with time. Some sources advise trying to keep the dough cool; our dough worked better when it had time to warm up a bit. The cookies had a lot of flavour but were not quite as crispy as I would want, so the recipe is not yet perfect enough for sharing.

Christmas baking will be happening this weekend. I’m not sure if I’ll get around to vörtbröd – probably not, because lussebullar and gingerbread cookies will have priority – but in case I do, I am all set with wort extract.

Wort extract can be bought online, and I know some breweries sell it as well. I went to Stockholms Aeter & Essencefabrik, conveniently located just a few blocks from my city office. Shelf after shelf of jarred spices, tiny vials of mysterious “essences”, and containers of all sorts of other things. If I ever need orange flower essence or dried chamomile, I now know where to go.

Less exotic, but about as unusual for me to buy as wort extract, was a small bottle of brandy. Of which I intend to never take a single sip, but it is necessary both for mincemeat and for brandy sauce to serve with the Christmas pudding.

Lemon poppyseed cake, going straight into the freezer.

I think of lemon poppyseed cake, along with Estonian oatmeal cookies, as my “fingerprint” cakes. I wouldn’t say that either is my absolute favourite. They’re up there, but I want different cakes at different times, and no one cake is better than everything else. But if you asked me to list, say, five or ten favourites, these two would be there. And they’re cakes that I think I like more than most other people do. In Sweden, I imagine that most people’s list of favourites would be things like cinnamon buns, princess cake, chocolate chip cookies. If you then clustered people by their favourites, you could probably pick me out from among all of them. Sort of like device fingeprinting but with cake. Am I Unique?

Sometimes Ingrid and/or Adrian are in a baking kind of a mood, and the freezer and the cake tins are full of a variety of cakes and cookies. Times like that, I myself only bake when I want something very specific. Other times – like now – they are not in the mood, and the stash runs low. Right now there is a serious cake shortage in the house, so I guess I’m baking.

Baking is not a hobby for me. I don’t mind doing it, but I also don’t go out of my way to experiment, try new recipes, tweak the details, buy books and equipment. I just want cake.

The recipe called for 150 grams of chocolate. In a cupboard I found half of a 50-gram tablet of a dark milk chocolate that I didn’t particularly enjoy. A bit old, but I figured it would be good enough for baking.

It was really not. For some reason that chocolate just wouldn’t melt in the melted butter that I added it to. Instead it turned into sticky clumps, in a way I’ve never seen before, and it took a lot of energetic whisking to break those up. I did manage in the end, and the final result was a fully normal, delicious-looking brownie.

I assume it’s going to taste fully normal as well – I’ll find out some other day. This late in the day I’m not interested in eating heavy sweets, and the whole batch goes straight into the freezer, except maybe for a piece or two for tomorrow, depending on how well (or badly) I can fit all the pieces into boxes.

The Tower, the Eye, comic books and Halloween cake.

I booked us rooms at a hotel very close to where I used to live, near Aldgate East. Far enough from the touristy sites to be reasonable in price, and an area I still feel roughly familiar with. There were similarly-priced places in West London, but I couldn’t judge whether the area would be reasonably safe and clean or not.

In the morning we had tickets to the Tower of London. Most major sites require advance booking of timed tickets these days, and the Tower is no exception. The Tower was walking distance from the hotel, and it was surprisingly not raining at all. But first, a quick stop by the building where I used to live. It’s still there and looks more or less like before, except the building opposite our apartment gaining a few floors and blocking what used to be our view. Not that it matters anymore.

Then through St Katherine’s Docks to the Tower. Getting there early in the day was the right choice – there were no crowds at all. Wise from previous experience, I took us straight to the Crown Jewels, which I knew would gain massive queues later in the day.

The crown jewels themselves are almost unreal. Royal crowns encrusted with hundreds of priceless jewels, giant diamonds. Orbs and sceptres and whatnot. Unfortunately but understandably there’s no photography allowed in there.

We spent a couple of hours wandering around the Tower itself, visiting the various exhibitions, checking out old armour, reading about the menagerie that used to be housed here, etc etc.

If I was utterly filthy rich, I wouldn’t mind having a castle of my own, with plenty of picturesque passages and spiral staircases and wrought-iron details.

It was nearing lunchtime when we felt done with the Tower. On Adrian’s “to do” list for London was proper English fish and chips. Instead of a pub, we headed for Borough Market. It is – like most things – much more touristy than it used to be, but I still like the vibe.

I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to eat. Nothing sounded quite right, until I saw this risotto place, and immediately knew that that was what I wanted for lunch. It was delicious.

The fish was good but greasy, Adrian said. The mushy peas were the best part of the meal.

The ergonomics of eating on a bench were so-so.

Next up: comic books. We browsed comics in the basement of Gosh! Comics…

… and then browsed some more at Forbidden Planet.

By now it had been a couple of hours since lunch, and we needed an afternoon snack. I wanted a smoothie, Adrian wanted good cake. Both were willing to consider ice cream instead. We wandered around in the Neal Street and Covent Garden area, Googled, still couldn’t quite find anything that we really liked. Finally we ran across a cake shop that immediately pulled us in with amazing-looking Halloween-themed cakes in the window, called L’ETO.

And they had smoothies as well! Smoothies seem to have a strong healthy eating vibe in London – every single one had some fad food in them. This green one sounded the fruitiest, even though it had kale in it. Tasted less detox-y than it looked.

The cakes looked even more amazing up close. Adrian’s was called “Feel the beat” and was decorated with an anatomically correct heart (as far as I could judge). The inside (raspberry and pistachio) was good but not amazing – could have more flavour, he said. We’ve been spoiled by delicacies we get at Spånga Konditori.

My “Poison Apple” had a shiny outside and a core of ginger spiced apple compote inside.

We topped off the day with a twilight ride on the London Eye. Eye-wateringly expensive, but not quite so bad that I would skip it

London at night looks pretty awesome.