"How about these?" Jane asked, picking up a small green plastic punnet of berries and offering them to Thor.
He took the basket and sniffed at it, then grinned as he recognized the bright red berries within as something he'd encountered on a visit to earth several centuries earlier. "These will do very well," he said approvingly, looked thoughtfully at the basket to judge its size, and did some rapid mental math. "Four baskets of this size should be enough." He looked around for Darcy, who had their shopping cart, and spotted her a couple of rows over, piling some selections of her own into it.
"Check it out, Jane," Darcy said happily as the two caught up with her and placed their baskets of berries into the cart. "They have those huge Japanese pears I like."
"These are pears?" Thor asked, surprised, picking up one of the globular fruits, one almost as large as his own fist. The fruit was very firm, without any of the give to its flesh that he'd have expected from a ripe pear.
"Yeah, a special kind. Remember the watermelon we had this summer? They're kind of watery like that, but firm-fleshed, like a green apple."
"Interesting," he said, then put the fruit back down. "I need pears for the tarts I'm making, but not this kind."
"They have Anjou and Bartlett pears as well, among others," Jane said, pointing, and Darcy pushed the cart further down the aisle, stopping it in front of a different section of the display, one heaped with pears of varieties that looked much more like the pears he was familiar with.
By the time he'd found all the different sorts of fruits and berries he needed for the filling – or at least decided which Midgardian ones would be acceptable substitutes, since such things varied greatly among the Nine Realms and none of the varieties he was used to were available here – their cart was almost half full, both Jane and Darcy having insisted on adding extra things to it. He ended up purchasing several varieties of flour, since he wasn't sure what kind would be closest to the type used in Asgard, and his attempt to describe the soft cheese used in making the rich pastry dough he had in mind led to Darcy insisting on picking up three different kinds of cheese, which she described to him as cream, ricotta, and cottage, as well as some yogurt which she said they could strain to make a fourth kind.
"I can always turn it into some sort of dip to contribute to the party if it's not what you need," she said as she placed a large tub of it into the cart. "Oh! Chips. We need potato chips," she said, and zoomed off to go add more things to the cart, Jane trailing along after her and saying they should also obtain the ingredients to make nachos once they got home to their apartment in the tower.
It was a fun evening in, the three of them eating nachos and quesadillas, Jane and Darcy watching while Thor set about testing the various cheeses and flours by making small batches of dough. It was late evening before he finally decided on which combination of ingredients came the closest in taste and texture to what he remembered from the times when Frigga, craving her favourite dessert from her own long-ago youth on Vanaheim, had claimed a table in the castle kitchens and had Thor and Loki help her in making the fruit-filled tartlets. It was a long time since the three of them had last done so – centuries, at least – but he remembered the tarts as clearly as if he'd eaten one just a day or two ago, still remembered how the dough should feel as he worked it, the taste and smell of it and of the sweet filling of mixed chopped fruits and whole berries. He regretted having outgrown that closeness, time spent in martial practise and out in the field with his friends having eventually grown more important to him than a few pleasant hours spent in the kitchens with mother and brother.
The next day he began work on making the tartlets, first mixing up a large batch of the dough and putting it in the fridge to chill while he washed, peeled, and chopped the various fruits and berries, combining them in a large bowl with honey and spices to make the sweet filling.
Jane and Darcy came back from the lab for a late lunch to find him seated at the kitchen table, staring disconsolately at the array of muffin tins full of unbaked tarts spread out before him, a mound of unshaped dough on a cutting board in front of him.
"What's wrong?" Jane asked, taking in his expression.
Thor frowned, trying not to let how upset he was feeling show. "It's... I tried to decorate the tarts," he explained, voice low. "The dough needs to be shaped and assembled into leaves and flowers over top of the filling. I used to help with that when I was younger, but..." he stopped, flexed his hands, and forced himself to look up at Jane and smile. "My hands are a warrior's hands. The mixing of the dough or the blending of the filling, shaping and filling the tarts, I can do all of that quite well, but crafting the dough into decorations for the top... that takes nimble fingers. Mother and Loki..." he stopped, turning his gaze downwards again, unable to continue, his smile flattening into a tremulous line. Jane stepped closer, leaning down to wrap her arms comfortingly around his shoulders and kiss his temple.
"I miss them," he managed to admit. "I miss them both so much."
Jane held him while he fought back tears. He hadn't even noticed that Darcy had left until she returned some minutes later, rushing into the room and noisily dropping several round tins onto the table beside the cutting board.
"I got you covered, big guy," she said firmly, and picked up one of the tins, showing him the illustration of flower-shapes on its lid before popping it open and dumping out its contents. "See? Little flower-shaped cookie cutters. And one of leaves, and butterflies, and playing card symbols... all you gotta do is roll out the dough and then we can go to town with cutting out shapes and making the decorations out of them. Will that work?"
Thor stared at the growing mound of cutters, and found a real smile lifting his lips. "It will work very well," he agreed, rising to his feet and reaching for the rolling pin he'd used in making the pastry shells earlier in the day. "Will you two stay and help?"
"Of course we will," Jane said, and stayed at his side while he rolled out some of the dough.
The rest of the assembly went quickly, and with much laughter, as Thor rolled out the dough and all three of them wielded the cutters. Jane and Darcy deftly layered together cutouts of leaves and flowers and other shapes on top of the tarts, pinching or stretching each bit of dough to give it a more sculpted shape than the flat cutouts. The end result wasn't the same as the fantastical, detailed creations that Frigga and Loki would have crafted, in that long-ago time when he and his brother had still been young and relatively innocent, but the feeling of warm friendship and the laughter and smiles they shared as they worked were much the same.
