2 days until Christmas…
It seems appropriate to finish off my cookie plates with classic treats that are as good today as they were when my great-grandma made them. These are the sorts of treats that most American kids grew up eating. I am not sure I remember a single Christmas without Sugar Cookies and peanut brittle. 
Being a very modern woman, I’ve dabbled in other types of brittle. We’ve made bacon almond brittle with hints of rosemary and chilis. We’ve tried pecan brittle with a bit of orange rind. I’ve even tried to make brittle in the off-season. Somehow, though, we always find our way back to peanut brittle. It’s crunchy and caramel-y. It’s chunky, salty, and sweet. This is better than the weird boxes of peanut brittle you can pick up at the drug store. It’s worth risking the burns. 
Another thing to note, I had a heck of a time finding appropriate peanuts to put in the brittle. I just wanted some Spanish peanuts. I feel like I used to see them all over, but I went to a couple of different stores and didn’t see them. I used cocktail peanuts instead, lightly salted. 
There are an insane amount of sugar cookie recipes available. This one is one that you should not make according to the recipe. If you follow the recipe, the thing you make will be a sweet quiche-y sort of thing. It will not be cookies. The recipe is missing flour. I don’t know how the proofreader missed that. After consulting various cookbooks, I determined that for the amount of fat and eggs in the recipe, about 5 cups of flour was the right amount. I was slightly wrong. I think 4 1/2 would’ve been better. I added a couple of tablespoons of milk to hold everything together.
The best part of making sugar cookies is decorating them afterwards. We cheated this year and bought cookie frosting. I get a break on this one, I made 6 different kinds of cookies and 6 different kinds of candy in 2 days. It allowed me to sit down with the kids and decorate with minimal clean up after. The kids love to decorate cookies. They are getting quite accomplished at it. There was some marbling going on and some fancy sugar work.
That wraps up the cookie plate for this year. Plates were taken to neighbors, plates were taken to work. We are going to need to have people over to help us eat the rest of them.
Nicely decorated cookies and great photos, as usual. (You can get Spanish peanuts at Farm and Fleet, for those in the midwest.) Merry Christmas, Ann, to you and your family!
Thanks for all of that. It just seems like they used to be available all over.