One of yesterday’s cakes: banana cake with chocolate and walnuts. Super moist, barely has any structural integrity even after cooling. It was a whole project to carefully slice it and stack the slices for freezing; I don’t think I’ve ever had to handle a cake with such care. Now I have banana cake in the freezer.

Today was the first day warm enough for the team at Sortera to have lunch outside in the sun on the quay.

Today was also the day I found a last, lost, lonely lussebulle in a corner of the freezer. Still tasted good.

Conference day two, with Active Solution on Monte Isola and in Iseo.

The morning was dedicated to knowledge activities, just like yesterday. A talk, and then coding together in small teams. The weather was pretty fabulous again and we could sit and code outside in the garden behind the castle, without layers of sweaters. There was even a power outlet hidden in the stone wall – as if this spot was made for developers.

In the afternoon we went on a e-bike tour. All forty-plus of us. It meant a very slow pace and plenty of stopping, so that the group could gather up and cross larger roads with as little traffic disruption as possible.

The tour started in central Iseo, right where we got off the boat from Monte Isola, but soon took us out of town onto more rural lanes.

This was my first time using an e-bike. I’m not sure I like it very much. It felt strange to not have any resistance at all when pedalling – I felt that I didn’t get any proper contact with the bike, and it felt a bit unstable and unsafe. In the end I ended up turning off the electric feature on the flat, and only switched it on very briefly for going uphill, where I would normally have shifted into a lower gear. It felt good to feel the bike. I can imagine that e-bikes would be very convenient for commuting – there’s no way you’d work up a sweat, so there’s no need to shower and change when you get to the office.

More waiting – but with very pretty views and beautiful spring sunshine. Did I mention that Stockholm was barely above freezing when we left? Here it was the season for short sleeves and sun lotion.

Our destination was the Bersi Serlini vineyard.

We got a tour of the winery and a brief lecture about their history and process, learning most importantly that Franciacorta sparkling wines are definitely not prosecco.

A walk through their somewhat spooky cellars.

Afterwards there was a wine tasting, where we got to try out four different varieties of Bersi Serlini sparkling wines. They were… nice? I rarely consume any alcohol at all, and when I do drink wine then dry sparkling wine is probably the kind I am least interested in.

Afterwards we cycled back to Iseo. Had a half-hour of free time for a brief walk around.

Excellent pizza dinner at Pizzeria La Filanda. All the pizzas were served to share, and I was most happy to see that at least half of them were vegetarian, so I enjoyed this meal a lot.

This past weekend was the last weekend of March and brought with it the turning of the clocks, i.e. the switch to summer time.

The Sunday I usually don’t notice it much. The Monday is still OK, I’ve got reserves and I don’t notice using them. But then on the Tuesday I’m tired and sluggish and everything feels off. Wednesday is often no better, and only towards the end of the week do I feel back to normal. How I wish we could stop this madness.

This evening I was too tired to cook and too tired to have much of an appetite, so it was breakfast for dinner. (Toast, smashed avocado, egg mayo, and my favourite juice – cucumber, kiwi and apple.) Complete with the morning paper that I didn’t have time to read this weekend. And with a little vase with the first spring flowers, that Ingrid surprised me with.

Ingrid works part-time at Spånga Konditori on weekends, and often brings home leftover bread and pastries that would otherwise be thrown out. Buns that are too lopsided, pastries that look uneven, various things that are just too old to sell.

Almost every time, she brings home a loaf of sourdough bread. The darker kinds of bread, the bakery sells at half price the day after. But the light sourdough bread they don’t think is good enough even at half price, so all that’s left over at the end of the day gets thrown out.

She doesn’t bring it home for us to eat, because there’s no way we would be able to eat that much! I’d get bored of the bread well before it’s gone. It’s good, but this kind of light bread is a bit too bland for my taste.

No, she brings it to me so that I can take it with me to work. I used to do it at tretton37, and now I do it at Sortera. The folks at the Sortera office are getting used to having nearly-fresh sourdough bread for lunch on Mondays. I tend to plan my own lunch around it as well – maybe a soup or a lighter stew – and together we eat all or nearly all of it.

Today I brought a loaf with me to Active Solution. And discovered that the people at this office have very different meal habits. Many go out to eat lunch at a restaurant; lunch boxes are far less common here, so they don’t even sit in the kitchen for lunch, and then of course have less opportunity to eat the bread.

Probably as a result of the above, there’s also much less of a culture of shared stuff in the fridge. I’m so used from all previous offices that there would always be at least, like, butter, cheese and ketchup in the fridge. Here I had to go out and buy a package of butter.

At the end of the day, three quarters of the loaf was still there and came home with me again. Over half of what did get eaten, I ate myself. I think I’ll be making bread pudding of the rest tomorrow.

Just… interesting to see how such a basic thing as bread and butter can work differently in different places.

Today was not my mum’s birthday, but we celebrated anyway. The kids are both very used to having birthday parties on some random day, chosen for reasons of practicality rather than calendrical accuracy. My mum is not quite as convinced that this is an acceptable way of doing things, but didn’t object to being offered dinner and cake.

For the cake part of things, Ingrid made and decorated macarons.

Raspberry and dark chocolate macarons, using freeze-dried raspberries both in the macarons and for decorations. Much less messy than fresh or puréed raspberries, very clever.

In eight grade, Swedish schoolchildren get to do practical work experience. The concept is called prao in Swedish. Kids spend two weeks at an actual workplace, doing real work.

This is Adrian’s second week of prao at a Brillo Pizza, and I stopped by to see him at work.

The first challenge is to find a prao place. Some find a place through friends and family, but I couldn’t find anything suitable at Sortera. (It’s all either office jobs, or work that is too dirty and dangerous for an inexperienced underage worker.) Adrian spent hours searching, both online and just walking from place to place, before landing a prao place at Brillo Pizza near Odenplan.

I got to order a pizza from Adrian, pay him for it, and watch him make it fresh for me. I found out that pizzerias have machines to flatten balls of dough into standard-sized pizza bases.

I also learned that they pre-portion all the toppings such as cheese in plastic cups during slow periods, so when it’s time to make a pizza, there’s no measuring or guessing – just grab a cup and spread its contents on the pizza. A standard pizza gets 110 grams of cheese. A pepperoni pizza has exactly 14 slices of pepperoni, and a kebab pizza gets 80 grams of meat.

Adrian made a pizza for himself as well and then we could have lunch together. We both opted for a “Maggan”, which is a fancy margherita topped with extra mozzarella after it’s baked. (Mine is half-sized since I don’t eat like a growing teenager any more.)

The internet informed me that you could “fry” eggs in heavy cream. I like eggs and I like cream, so I tried it out.

Really it’s not so much frying as cooking, perhaps even caramelizing. The cream and eggs go in a cold pan and then you heat them together, until most of the water in the cream has evaporated and the eggs are done – which, fortuitously, happens at roughly the same time.

The first bite tasted just like normal fried eggs. That’s because it was just the eggs. The second bite had a fair bit of the reduced, caramelized cream, and was delicious.

Normally, frying is not my favourite way of preparing eggs. When I do fry eggs, it’s either because I’m in a hurry, or because the dish calls for them (for, say, pytt i panna/potato hash). I prefer my eggs on the creamier side, and the crisp underside of fried eggs is OK but not my favourite. This cream-cooking process is slower, so there’s less crisp, and at the same time the cream makes the temperature more self-regulating so I don’t have to watch it all the time. I think I like it.

Leaving the buns overnight made no difference.

I thought again about throwing them out but Adrian convinced me to bake them after all, because why not.

Some of them (I had four trays full) rose a bit in the oven – not to the level of fluffiness I’d expect, but there was a definite improvement. Others came out almost as small as they were when they went in. I tried one, and while the texture was disappointing, there was nothing wrong with the flavour. Good enough that I ate another one. I guess they can go into the freezer instead of the compost bin. I just need to remember to have the right kind of expectations when I take them out to eat.

My brother visited us today for a slightly late low-key birthday celebration. We ate semlor from Spånga konditori, which were delicious but which I forgot to photograph, and made poppy seed buns, which I remembered to take a photo of.

For some reason the bun dough refused to rise. I waited for hours, moved them to a warmer spot, but nothing. The dough is starting to look rather dry, despite being covered all the time. I was close to just throwing them out but might as well leave them overnight to see if the dough wakes up. Nothing to lose, I guess.