Saw a absolutely brilliant reblog tag a bit ago from @tinglingfuckingsensation comparing Nix to sleeping beauty and that mental image has been haunting me like the ghost of a Victorian child for the last week, so naturally I had to do something about it :O
A few years ago, when I was living in the housing co-op and looking for a quick cookie recipe, I came across a blog post for something called “Norwegian Christmas butter squares.” I’d never found anything like it before: it created rich, buttery and chewy cookies, like a vastly superior version of the holiday sugar cookies I’d eaten growing up. About a year ago I went looking for the recipe again, and failed to find it. The blog had been taken down, and it sent me into momentary panic.
Luckily, I remembered enough to find it on the Wayback Machine, and quickly copied it into a file that I’ve saved ever since. I probably make these cookies about once a month, and they last about five days around my voracious husband - they’re fantastic with a cup of bitter coffee or tea. I’m skeptical that there is something distinctively Norwegian about these cookies, but they do seem like the perfect thing to eat on a cold day.
Norwegian Christmas Butter Squares
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 egg
1 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla
½ tsp salt
Turbinado/ Raw Sugar for dusting
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chill a 9x13″ baking pan in the freezer. Do not grease the pan.
Using a mixer, blend the butter, egg, sugar, and salt together until it is creamy. Add the flour and vanilla and mix using your hands until the mixture holds together in large clumps. If it seems overly soft, add a little extra flour.
Using your hands, press the dough out onto the chilled and ungreased baking sheet until it is even and ¼ inch thick. Dust the top of the cookies evenly with raw sugar.
Bake at 400 degrees until the edges turn a golden brown, about 12-15 minutes. Remove from the oven. Let cool for about five minutes before cutting the cooked dough into squares. Remove the squares from the warm pan using a spatula.
It basically makes the platonic ideal of commercial sugar cookies, only in bar form. When I give them to people (which I do a lot, because this is one of those simple recipes where the results seem very impressive), I just tell them they’re sugar cookie bars.
The OP version of this has become my go-to cookie for basically all things and I have a whole cohort of friends and colleagues who would murder each other to get them. Haven’t tried any add ons yet, since the base recipe is SO GOOD.
I’ve reblogged this before and I’m reblogging it again because I’m about to make it again tomorrow and I wanted to add my own tale of just how amazingly delicious it. it was SO incredibly simple to bake and with an extra dusting of brown sugar on top and served warm and soft they gift you with the taste of the nectar of the gods when paired with a small glass of milk. this image is from when I first made them a couple years ago:
Needed to make a dessert in a hurry to bring to Thanksgiving, and this recipe worked excellently. I did not have the right kind of sugar for the topping, so instead I used a packet of lemonade powder, which gave it a nice citrusy zing.
Making these for myself as a reward for doing the no fun thing I’ve been putting off. Added half a lemon of lemon juice and a bit more flour. Let’s see how it turns out. >:3
Lipton in the Ambrose Interview ^ (Shut up, Steve. I'm talking about Ron and how he healed me. )
Lipton in his own written memories about that event
It really does not seem like mean, bang-bang, Bloody Speirs kicked these people out of their home. There was only one bed, one SINGLE bed--a couple would probably have at least a double bed.
So , was there another bed, they just didn't kick these people out of their house in order to use it, and used the guest room and just made the "only one bed" trope happen.
And these people are so thrilled about the American couple letting them stay in their house in the middle of winter that they overhear this argument, get Lip liquored up, and say goodnight and watch him emerge in the morning 'a new person'.
Happy birthday, Ed Shames. You were too powerful; they had to relegate your place in the show to about five seconds of screentime and a negative mention.
Shamecock; canon era postwar AU (1440 words)
---
“What are you doing here?” is all he can think to say. It’s the biggest question on his mind, anyways, so it doesn’t matter all that much that he can’t pick anything else coherent out of his racing thoughts. Edward Shames, here, all the way from (presumably) Virginia, on Peacock’s doorstep. Did he miss a letter?
“I came to see you!” and his voice is too loud, too raw. Peacock thinks he gets it now:
“Are you drunk?”
“No, I’m not—okay, maybe a little. But not so bad that I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Peacock’s not sure he’s ever seen him so unsteady on his feet. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, Tom, I’m sure! Look, I just—I just needed to see you, okay? I never got to say goodbye. It didn’t feel right. Please, let me make it right.”
He has to be drunk. The desperation in his voice is nothing Shames would ever let slip out unless he wasn’t in complete control of himself, Peacock reasons. He’s not thinking straight; he’s being impulsive and unreasonable and ridiculous because this isn’t a foxhole in Belgium, this isn’t an abandoned high-end hotel in Austria, this isn’t fucking—
This isn’t something that happens, here. Not in this Washington college town, not in broad view of everyone and their mother on the street. It might be dark, might be raining, but anyone walking by or peering out their windows right now stands a good chance of getting a good look at their faces. A good look at which building Peacock lives in, if nothing else.
But Shames is still standing there, hair plastered to his skull and looking up at him like he’s the one radiating light, not the bulb in the porch fixture. Peacock can’t take it. There’s too much in his chest clamoring for recognition, built-up anger and sadness and anxiety and whatever else you want to name. This is ridiculous.
He huffs a sigh before he can stop himself, and notices the shiver that’s running through Shames’ frame as he stands straight-backed and incorrigible as always on his stairs.
“Just—come inside before you catch a cold, alright?” Peacock hisses, beckoning him through the door. He yanks it shut after him, and whirls to face him.
He’s way too close. All at once Peacock’s a nervous replacement officer again, eyeing up the freshly-promoted lieutenant he’s billeted with and howling mentally at the brass because of all the officers here, he just had to get paired with one who looks like every late-night conjuring his hedonistic imagination has ever subjected him to. And he’s looking at him right back, eyes dark and with that challenging edge that had Peacock swallowing and steeling himself against when they’d first met, before he knew that that was just Ed’s resting face and—
Christ, he’s right here, Peacock laments as they stare at each other. Right here, and yet further from mine than anyone could ever get. He didn't think he'd ever see him again. He's had this conversation in his head nigh-on a thousand times by now, starting from the moment he stepped onto the train back to Washington, but words fail him now and all he can do is marvel at how it feels to be next to him again.
He thought it'd fade with distance, or with time. But nope. He's just as hopelessly, stupidly smitten now as he was back when he was letting Ed kiss him silly in grossly lavish German houses and among impossibly green trees. It's like the polarity of his very blood has tuned to this man’s presence, and it could not possibly make him any more angry with himself that he let this happen.
Shames steps impossibly closer, and Peacock tears his gaze from his face in favor of tracking the path of the water droplets sliding down his neck, soaking into his collar, resting in the hollow of his throat—
No, not better, he howls at himself, and feels his face heat as he tries to find somewhere, anywhere, else to look.
“Tommy,” Shames lows, and Peacock curses himself for how weak he is. That he’d do anything for this man in front of him, that he’s frail at the knees in a decidedly girlish way at just the way he says his name. His goddamn name. He scrabbles to get ahold of himself and yanks out of his space, shouldering past him into the hall. He doesn’t turn to see what his face looks like at the silent rejection, doesn’t want to look at the expression he’s making as he watches Peacock run from him.
I’m not running, he insists. I’m getting him a towel, and making sure there’s enough space between us so we don’t do something we’d both regret.
Something Shames would regret, rather. He’s hanging by a thread of pride alone, just barely keeping from letting Shames do whatever the hell he wants to him. He doesn't think there's anything he could possibly regret in this moment; if nothing happens, he'll have been smart. If something does happen, he'll have one last memory to hold onto as he tries to double down on living an acceptable, normal rest of his life. And if it goes bad, well, that just ensures Shames’ll never show up on his doorstep without warning in the middle of the night again.
Now’s not the time to toss out your goddamn self respect, he chides himself as he steps back into the hall with a towel.
“Here,” he whispers, and holds it out to him. He doesn’t look him in the eye, doesn’t want to mark his expression, but he can feel his gaze heavy on him all the same. Just like he could in Europe, even from all the way across a room, keen and level and wanting—
“Thanks,” he says, voice gruff, and takes it from him.
“What are you doing here?” Peacock asks him again, daring to look at him as he rubs his hair dry, runs the fabric over his face and across the back of his neck.
“I’m on leave,” he says. “It was the first train on the timetable. It felt… It felt like a sign.”
This hesitancy is new to Peacock; the intensity is not. His words are halting like he’s casting about for them, but the look in his eye isn’t much different from the one that tipped him off at the very start that maybe he wasn’t the only one imagining someone else’s hands on him when he took what time and privacy the army afforded to himself.
“Was this before or after you started drinking?”
Maybe it’s an unfair thing to ask, but he has to know. Was the idea to see him brought on by intoxication, or has he been half as broken up by the whole situation as Peacock has been? Has he been missing him since he realized he got on that train without any parting words? Has he been memorizing his address, staring at the scrawl of his handwriting on the back of that scrap of some map or other he still had tucked into his ODs, the one he gave Peacock to write his address on in a spare moment while celebrating Japan’s surrender? Always two steps ahead, Peacock had mused to himself, giddy on Austrian spirits and relief and Ed’s company.
Peacock thinks he could recite Shames’ mother’s address (“because I don’t know where I’ll be, but she’ll be the first to know,” he’d explained. “If you write there, I’ll get it.”) faster than his own serial number (now irrelevant since his discharge) at this point. He wonders if Shames had to look more than twice at his writing before he found his way to him, half-drunk and fresh off the train.
“I—” Shames starts to respond, but trails off in favor of just staring at Peacock. Deep brown eyes sparking in some intoxicated emotion, searching his face as if he’s drowning and Peacock’s some last gulp of air. He finds himself unable to break from his gaze, unable to look anywhere else but at the face of this breathtakingly headstrong man as he stands before him, dripping on his hardwood floor.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Try as he might, Peacock can’t bring his voice above a whisper. He swallows, and watches Ed’s throat work just as labored.
He doesn’t respond. Just snaps his eyes back to his, unblinking, and heaves a shuddering breath. Opens his mouth as if to say something, closes it again, and lunges forward to cross that immeasurable distance between them and kisses him.
Thank you to @lowdisk951 for being absolutely wonderful and the king of finding references even in the worst of conditions, I appreciate it so so much! Hope it came out somewhat close to what you’d imagined <3
I’m working my way back into familiarity with the medium and they have been absolutely phenomenal subjects to do so with :D
I have a few pages of thumbnails and such that haven’t made their way into a completed piece and I’ve attached one such page below as I will probably never find the motivation to do anything with them 😔
The page in question :D
I’ve got a knight/medieval au stuck in my brain but I can’t get anything solid to come out of it as of now, fingers are crossed tho so we shall see if that changes lol
Morelarkey my beloved, you have fully taken over my brain and my Pinterest boards
Thank you to the spectacular @lowdisk951 for letting me once again pull from his cowboy WIP. Morelarkey isn’t endgame there but the vibes have got me entirely hooked 👀
It’s a little messy but I’m blaming that on relearning watercolors 🕺
I’ve had the reference saved with them in mind for an embarrassing amount of time so I decided to use the poll steals as an excuse to finally break it out!