The Easy Trick To Bringing Stale Christmas Cookies Back To Life
Instagram is fooling you. Not all gingerbread molasses cookies are deliciously moist and perfectly crinkled. Not all chocolate chip peppermint cookies are soft, chewy, and gorgeous. Not every single peanut butter blossom is melt-in-your-mouth. Comfort food queen Ina Garten may be a pro at making Christmas cookies, but that doesn't mean that yours have to come out of the oven, fit for Santa's reindeer every time you cook them. Because even when your Christmas creations come out of the oven a bit drier than you'd like them (or when they last all of an hour before becoming paler, staler versions of themselves) there's a way to bring your cookies back to life.
No, this is not a trick out of Hogwarts' kitchen. No wands, spells, or laboriously brewed up potions are necessary. All you'll need is a piece of fresh bread. And, preferably, something as flavorless as the white Wonder Bread that used to float around the kitchen sets in That '70s Show (via Product Placement Blog).
How to revive cookies with a slice of bread
Got yourself a cookie jar? Because you'll need one. Or, at the very least you'll want a large Tupperware container or a resealable ziplock bag. Taste of Home writer Lisa Kaminski swears by this trick: put your cookies into a jar, along with your slice of Wonder Bread and wait a couple of hours for your Christmas miracle. Essentially, you'll be giving your thirsty cookies some much-needed hydration. As your cookies drink in the water from your bread, they'll get softer, and the bread in your cookie jar will get staler. If you've made a lot of Christmas cookies, you might put more than one piece of bread into your jar. She Knows recommends a quarter of a slice for every 12 cookies that need a bit of TLC. (Go ahead and use your stale bread leftovers for some seasonal bread pudding.)
Finally, if you use flavorful breads, you may end up with Christmas cookie hybrids to the tune of pumpernickel-infused sugar cookies or rye-infused snicker-doodles. We'd stick to Wonder Bread, although, who knows, perhaps focaccia flavored gingerbread men are destined to become the next big thing.