If my grandmother Greta had been alive, she would have turned 99 last Monday and, quite naturally, I have been thinking a lot about her for the last couple of days. She was, as I have mentioned before, a woman with many talents and one of them was to bake. She baked bread and she baked cakes. Though she didn't quite followed the tradition of a Swedish "kafferep" (a social meeting where you drank coffee and had cakes) and always had "seven kinds of cakes" at home, she had, at any given time, always buns, sponge breads and several kind of cookies. My Mum said only the other day that when she was a kid there was a special "cookie cupboard" in the kitchen. One of her fortes was to bake three sponge cakes in the oven at the same time which made the middle one sunk, as it didn't get as much heat. For some reason that middle one always tasted like it was filled with almond paste.
Thinking of my grandmother and cakes made me remember that I have one of her cookbooks, the one the picture, called Läckra Rumfordfinesser ("Delicious Rumford Delicacies") from 1946. It’s really more a pamphlet to advertise the glory of Rumford baking powder, but it's a quite lavish one. There are several coloured pictures of rather tasty looking cakes and cookies, but most fun is the two pictures on the inside of the covers. The first one depicts two women engaged in just a "kafferep":
