Alright, let’s make this official. We have been dreaming, talking, tweeting and planning this. But let us once and for all put it in writing.
In just a couple of months – from 1 October to be specific – we are leaving Sweden for 6 months to travel the world, spend time with our daughter (and each other), get sunburned, blog a lot, eat well, read books and just relaaaax.
I’ll go on six months paid(!) paternity leave and Luise will be on leave of absence. We’ve actually been talking about doing something like this since the first day we met, and when we found out that we were becoming parents we started saving up for it. We are unbelievably happy and grateful that we get the chance to go through with it.
Our travel plans are still very loose, what we know for sure is that we want to spend a couple of months in California. Maybe we’ll start out in San Francisco and then move down to San Diego. After that we might go to South America or Vietnam or maybe we’ll take to Australia… we’ll see how it goes and how Elsa feels about it, and how far we can come before we’ll run out of money. We would love to hear about your traveling tips and do’s and don’ts when traveling with small children.
To celebrate this decision we made ourselves a summer cake.
This is our own very simple version of a cheesecake. No sugar, butter or flour added. And you don’t need an oven to make it (but you do need a freezer). We made the crust sweet and crunchy by using almonds, coconut oil and dates. And kept the filling quite fresh with mascarpone cheese, curd, honey and fresh strawberries and raspberries. I can easily go on and on about how good this cake tasted, but instead I just encourage you to try it for yourselves. Make it on a hot summer day and eat it outside before it melts away.
Frozen Pink Cheesecake
Crust:
300 g (2 cups) almonds
10-12 fresh dates, pitted
2 tbsp coconut oil
a pinch of salt
Filling:
2 cups fresh (or frozen) raspberries & strawberries
juice from 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup honey
1 cup mascarpone cheese
1 cup quark or curd (you could probably also replace it with a fat Greek or Turkish yogurt)
Topping:
1 cup fresh summer fruit and a couple of edible flowers
Grind almonds in a blender or a food processor for about a minute. Add dates, coconut oil and salt and run the processor until it all comes together. Flatten it out on the bottom of an 8-inch non-stick spring form. Store in the fridge while you make the filling.
Blend berries, lemon juice and honey. Stir together mascarpone, curd and the blended berries in a large bowl. Pour it on top of the crust in the spring pan and put it in the freezer for 1-2 hours (you can keep it in the freezer for days but then you have to let it soften a bit before you serve it) .
Top the cake with fresh fruit and a couple of flowers. Serve immediately.
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