Ingrid’s school has an annual cake competition. Ingrid and a couple of her friends made a volcano cake. Chocolate coating for the volcano itself, strawberry jam for lava, and some liquorice pieces for a staircase up to the mouth of the volcano.

It did not win any prizes but was the cake that everybody most wanted to eat.

Spring. Have I mentioned yet that it is spring here? And that I love it – the sun and the warmth and the blue skies and the way everything is growing?

I ate a spring breakfast this morning for the first time. In winter I eat hearty breakfasts: porridge, or maybe French toast, boiled eggs or bread: something solid and filling and preferably hot or at least warm.

In summer I still like all of those things, but I also love HavreFras with yoghurt and berries. I don’t like store-bought flavoured yoghurts because they all have too much sugar and too little fruit. Instead I buy unflavoured yoghurt and add loads of berries. In summer I use fresh berries but now frozen ones will have to do.

We had semlor.

A la carte semlor: Eric likes his as hetvägg (with hot milk); Adrian and Ingrid eat theirs without any whipped cream; I eat what I consider a “normal” semla but with less whipped cream than you get in most store-bought versions.

Eric baking mince pies.

Yes, mince pies are normally a Christmas thing… but we never got around to making ours during the Christmas holidays. Rather than saving the mincemeat until next year, we’re having yummy mince pies in February.

I take so many photos of the kids and so few of Eric. This was a conscious effort to do something about it, and to capture something of the essence of Eric. Baking is one of his favourite hobbies, and Eric’s hands are my favourite part of him.

My favourite crumble (which really is a scrunch rather than a crumble) is still as awesome as ever. Here with cherries.

We continued making Christmas. Today: gingerbread cookies. We have our own recipe for gingerbread cookie dough, which Eric has tweaked and optimized over the years, so the cookies we make are by now excellently suited to our taste. They are much spicier than store-bought ones.

For a kid, just making cookies is fun enough. Now that has become rather routine, so I come up with extra tweaks to make it more interesting. For example, I like to challenge myself to waste as little dough as possible. Not that it is really wasted, because we roll it out again and again, but do that enough times and the dough becomes too dry and floury.

(Of course an easy way to get the least scraps would be to tile the entire dough with either triangles or crescent moons, but that would be no fun at all, not to bake and not to eat.)

I work inwards from the edges of the rolled dough, choosing the shape that fits best and leaves the least scraps, and then filling in any gaps with smaller shapes.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise when the curve of the Christmas tree turned out to be a perfect fit for the curve of the pig’s belly.

We made a gingerbread house this weekend. Well, we actually cheated a bit and bought a kit with house pieces. Eric assembled it, and the kids and I decorated it with candy.

Adrian liked red things, but also added some eggs.

Ingrid did a geometrical design on her side of the house.

I myself went for a more delicate design.

We baked lussebullar, saffron buns, today. We ended up with a wild mixture of all kinds of buns, including traditional shapes as well as “a pancake” by Adrian, several plaits by Ingrid, a few animals, and other things. My mum, especially, gets bored with the traditional shapes pretty fast and makes all kinds of weird squiggles.

Every other Tuesday we get a box of organic vegetables from Ekolådan, “the organic box”. These are the contents of today’s box.

Mostly I welcome the challenge of cooking based on what I get. But sometimes it’s really hard.

Onions, tomatoes – no problem. Aubergine, courgette, beetroot, Jerusalem artichokes, pumpkin: the adults love them, the kids not so much, and I have no trouble coming up with meal ideas to use them up.

Cabbage is harder, because they are always huge. One pumpkin is one dinner. Two aubergines is also roughly one dinner. But one large head of cabbage is at least two dinners if I let the cabbage totally dominate the meal, or four if I don’t, and coming up with creative ways to serve cabbage twice a week is challenging. I currently have one ordinary cabbage, one savoy cabbage and one and a half Chinese cabbage, all waiting to be eaten.

Lettuce I’ve totally given up with. There’s almost always a head of lettuce in the box, and nobody in our home is fond of lettuce. Eric eats some when served, and Ingrid and I might eat a leaf or two if it’s in a hamburger or sandwich. Adrian of course will not even try it. So there is no way we will eat a head of lettuce every two weeks. So I found a neighbour who is fond of lettuce, and most Tuesdays they get ours.

No idea what to do with the chillies, either. We don’t really do spicy food at all normally, and that’s a lot of chillies…

Freshly baked bread.