Archway Cookies: A Nostalgic Review

Archway Cookies: A Nostalgic Review
When I was growing up we didn’t have soda or candy in the house, or junk food like Twinkies, but we did have cookies. Sometimes my mom made cookies from scratch, and sometimes she bought them. The thing is, some cookies need to be fresh and homemade, like chocolate chip cookies or oatmeal cookies. They just don’t taste right to me if they aren’t. But then there are some commercially produced cookies that are just fine and dandy. When I was growing up I can almost guarantee you would have found pecan sandies, lemon coolers, raisin biscuits, or almond windmills in the cookie jar. Oddly enough most of those cookies are not so easy to find these days. Pecan sandies are a kind of shortbread cookie, flecked with bits of nuts and are the only cookie I still routinely see in the supermarket (though reviews seem to say they aren’t as good as they used to be). Lemon coolers were very tangy cookies coated in powdered sugar. Raisin biscuits were affectionately known as ” fly biscuits ” in my family. They were thin layers of cookie, filled with raisins. They came in long strips that were perforated. Almond windmills later became just “windmills”, as the amount of slivered almonds was drastically reduced. Windmills are based on a spiced Dutch cookie called speculaas . Recently I got an email informing me that Archway was launching an iced lemonade cookie. Was I interested in trying some samples? Little did I know I would receive 13 packages of cookies in the mail. 13