Bonjour June

Of summer days and cold lakes, warm kitchens and the way home

Welcome to The Bakers’ Cottage, a newsletter about baking, stories, and the rhythm of life in the north. If you’re new here, thank you for joining. If you’re already a subscriber – I’m so glad you’re here.

This post is part of my Seasonal Letters series.

And this month’s letter is about light – how it lingers on the horizon, how it slowly returns within us. It’s about strawberry patches and spruce tips, schoolbags left in the hallway and midsummer songs sung dancing in circles.

It’s about the slow path back to yourself – through cake and quiet swims, through drawings and dinners and the scent of hägg [hackberry tree] in bloom.

There’s no recipe today – that’s coming soon – but I’ve shared memories, moments, and a June table filled with things that taste like Swedish summer. I hope this letter finds you in a patch of sun.

The post is a little long for email – if it cuts off, you can read the rest on the website or in the app.

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The strawberry patch, and everything after

The lilacs have just started to bloom, and the jordgubbslandet [strawberry patch] too. Dahlias grow taller, while the light stretches a little more each night – it never truly gets dark, only when a storm is approaching and the sky turns to charcoal. School’s nearly out. The lakes are barely warm enough to swim in, taking your breath away when you first enter the water. And somewhere in all of this – the scent of dill, the hum of bumblebees, the gentle chaos of summer coming – I’m celebrating something I didn’t quite see coming.

This summer marks twenty years since I first wrote about food online. It wasn’t planned, really.

How it all began

It started, like all good days, with a tiramisu. Not a grand one – but a lopsided chocolate and matcha one, with the summer light pooling on the counter of the table of my then-boyfriend’s house in Biot. We were young – twenty or so.

We’d driven to Valbonne, to the little salon de thé on Boulevard Carnot, the one my parents always chose for our birthday cakes.The owner, Jean-Jacques, had opened it the day I was born. A lucky star of some sort. We were in search of matcha tea.

We found it, and headed back to his house. I baked and wrote. I wrote because I couldn’t not. Because writing made sense. Because in the early 2000s, there was a magic to it – this intimate, generous world of food blogs, where stories and recipes braided themselves together, quietly and without performance.

Twenty years. A few pictures. So much in between.

That’s how it began. I didn’t know then that food would take me so far. Or that it would take so much.

The years in between

I trained in some of France’s best pâtisseries. Moved to London. Fell in love with the intensity of restaurant work – the long hours, the adrenaline, the way a perfect quenelle could feel like poetry. I became a head pastry chef.

I worked hard.

I gave it everything. And somewhere in the middle of all this, I lost myself.

A return, of sorts

We moved to Sweden. I thought I was leaving it all behind. In truth, it came with me.

For a while, the pace shifted. Seasons made themselves known. I noticed things again – the sound of snow under our feet, the first rhubarb in late May, the way watercolours pulled something back into my life. But I kept working, harder than ever, shaping dough before sunrise, plating desserts past midnight, until I couldn’t.

The signs had been there for years, but I waited until I could no longer breathe.

There is a darkness in stainless steel, when you love too much.

And then I did what I never thought I could. I paused. Stepped into a bubble I didn’t know I needed. Learned to be. To notice the stillness – cold lakes, early mornings, K. and Sienna, always. Drawing again. Writing – not for an audience, but because it steadied me.

I found Substack, and it felt like a return – not just to a platform, but to a way of sharing that reminded me of those early food blog days: personal, imperfect, full of quiet connection.

These past few months, I’ve remembered who I am when I step down from the carousel. I’ve been learning that I can still be a chef, a mother, a writer, an illustrator. That I don’t need to give all of myself to my work.

I’ve just returned to the restaurant – quietly, slowly – finding my way back without rushing. I adore the place I’ve poured so much of myself into. It’s more than a job. It’s home. I’ve worked with Jon Oskar in one way or another for ten years. He is family. And that kitchen is my sanctuary. But home can also be a dotted page. A sketchbook. A lake. Words that gather, just when I thought I had nothing left to say.

Twenty years of food writing. It feels like both a lifetime and a beginning.

Snapshots from five years at Bryggargatan.

What Elizabeth wrote

Last weekend, I received an email from Elizabeth in Belgium. She had stumbled across my writing and shared thoughts I had struggled to put into words myself – about the pace of the food world, the pressure to “invent wild new things”, and the quiet value of looking back instead of always forward.

She wrote about connecting to the wealth of baking culture that is already right before us – not to reinvent it, but to observe it more closely, to become more intimately familiar with it. Her message became a compass, pointing me back to the heart of what I do. This sense that, in a food world that often spins fast and loud, there is still value – maybe even necessity – in slowing down, looking back, and grounding ourselves in what has been loved and baked before us.

Not to preserve things set in stone, but to understand them, feel their weight, and give them space to live again in our kitchens.

A June table

This is the month of lingering light. Of cold swims and warm kitchens. Of schoolbags left in the hallway, rhubarb stalks in a glass of water, and the quiet whisper that means summer is here.

This is the month of forests that smell of rain, resin, and damp earth. Where granskott [spruce tips] glow bright green at the ends of every branch. We always pick a few handfuls – just enough to candy, or to make a jar of spruce salt.

This is the month of Sweden’s National Day. It doesn’t come with the fanfare and fireworks that accompany Bastille Day. But I made it a tradition for Sienna. We have Swedish köttbullar [meatballs] with buttery mashed potatoes, a creamy sauce, rårördalingon, and pressgurka. A salad with radishes and herbs from the raised beds behind our house. Crispbread and salted butter. And for dessert, a strawberry rulltårta [cream roll] with softly whipped cream and the paper flags we made together two years ago.

It is the month of fika in the garden – drömmar, hallongrottor, a bottle of rhubarb cordial or lilac spritz carried out in a basket.

And most importantly, it is the month of Midsummer Eve. Dancing around the midsommarstång, making crowns with birch twigs and the wildflowers that grow along the ditches. Gravad lax with hovmästarsås. New potatoes with dill and brown-butter. Pickled herring in mismatched glass jars. A pie made with Västerbotten cheese and topped with shrimps. Fresh strawberries in a bowl, with a little cream and a meringue cake.

A table for June – simple, sunlit, and full of things that taste like Swedish summer.