Today, January 26th, is National Peanut Brittle Day.

Brittle is a type of hard sugar candy - which has a mixture of sugar and water heated to the hard crack stage (146 to 154 °C or 295 to 309 °F). The mixture then has other ingredients mixed in, which in this case are peanuts, although other nuts can be used, and spices, leavening agents and butter or peanut butter can be added.

The resulting mixture is then poured onto a flat surface and allowed to cool. After it hardens, it is then broken into pieces.

Image: By Janet Hudson (originally posted to Flickr as Peanut Brittle) [CC BY 2.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons