Anyone who doesn’t like peanut butter, look away now.

One of the lovely things about the holidays is that I don’t have to worry about what school requires. In particular, I get very het up (what? Me? Get het up?) about how they go about advising us that we have no idea how to feed our children. Any communication that comes out about packed lunches is aimed at the ‘lowest common denominator’. I know this, but I still feel patronised by the exhortations to try and include a piece of fruit, and not to include chocolate. I think I give my kids good lunchboxes, but I do always try and include a piece of cake or a biscuit though, because that’s just being a good mummy as far as I’m concerned. My main constraint in this department, though, is the total ban on nuts in school. I waiver between being totally understanding about this and being totally annoyed by it because my kids love nuts and they are a good source of nutrition for them. But on balance I’d prefer it if I didn’t cause another child to have anaphylactic shock, so I go with it.

All the more reason so have a nut-fest during the hols, then, and I have been itching to bake these peanut butter cookies from Baked in America for ages. No way could I have made then during term time so they could sit around in the biscuit tin, calling to me while everyone else was at school/work. They wouldn’t have sat around for long...

The cookies are very straightforward to make – cream butter, peanut butter and sugar together, eggs, vanilla extract, flour – stir in peanuts. The mixture is scrummy (always a good sign).  

I recently acquired an ice cream scoop so I felt very pleased with myself scooping out as required by the recipe – my scoop is clearly not as big as theirs, but the uncooked cookies were still massive. I don’t know how big their baking trays are but I needed 3, and made 13 cookies (13 is lucky in Italy, and in baking, don’t you know – let’s have none of that superstitious nonsense here).

The unbaked cookies need 4 hours in the fridge. Mine ended up being in there over night, and I forgot the sprinkling of granulated sugar on top before baking, but apparently no harm done. They baked to instruction (no sinking for these babies) the kitchen smelt heavenly and they are totally scrumptious.

Good job the kids are at home to race me to the biscuit tin.