I jumped the gun so to speak, since I still have three more Tol-in-Gaurhoth stories as well as the last two chapters of Release from Bondage to finish before writing a multitude of these 'light hours' tales, but hey, sometimes you need a break from bittersweet fics. How many of those will be wedding comedies à la The Hangover, I won't say. G;ad you approved of this one.

This was a challenge for myself to give these characters a bit more detail by hypothesizing a food dish and then deciding what each individual would do.

This is technically a "Phase 2" work, whereas the ten Tol Sirion fics + Beren's Coda were what I thought of as Phase 1, with Release from Bondage ending at the start of what would be a slew of Second Age Valinor romantic comedies and daily life world-building disguised as fics. I didn't feel too guilty posting something from Phase 2 before I finished with Aglar, Gadwar, and Edrahil - not like I could keep to a chronologic order in writing any of Phase 1.

I swear, before this series, I would think of myself as not a dark writer - and honestly I still don't. I like bittersweet endings and stories about good characters who get the good endings they deserve, and I think these characters qualify, despite their temporary deaths. For all the darkness, they have hope, and unlike some other characters, they haven't fallen so low that it would take a very long redemption before rebirth. And Valinor of the Second Age under High King Finarfin, with a population blend of veterans of the Vanyar/Noldor Army of the Valar and veterans from Beleriand all settling in to rebuild and rediscover peace- with an exciting vibrant new ally in the fledgling Númenor- this influx of new cultures and innovations overall I find it as a setting to be infinitely more interesting and appealing than Valinor in the Time of the Two Trees.

Lemon Cakes are such a Sansa Stark thing that i couldn't base a character off her without bringing them up.

Alas, I love Beren too much, so even for a food writing exercise, he crept in.

I did promise slice-of-life and romantic comedies once I finished killing them ;)

It was fun, if a bit odd, to have Finrod's presence on-page to be equalled to the rest of the Band. Usually he rarely appears; the most screentime before this, I think, was as the corpse Beren held. So yeah, nice change of pace.