How to Store Your Homemade Cookies: Methods and Tips to Keep Them Fresh For a Long Time

Homemade cookies are one of the most fun activities you can do in the kitchen, alone or with your children or friends: you can choose from dozens of different recipes, they are usually quite easy and quick to make and, generally, they are so good that they are finished in a few hours. That's why, when you prepare them, it's always better to be generous with the quantities. As long as, of course, you learn how to store your homemade cookies properly. If you use the right techniques, in fact, you can always have them on hand as if they were freshly baked and, alternatively, you can also freeze them for long-term storage. Here are some tips on how to store homemade cookies in the best way and remember: the first rule is that, to store them, they must be perfectly cold and dry.

How to Store Soft Chewy Cookies

Soft biscuits are a real treat: whether they are the chocolate chip cookies famous for remaining “chewy” even after cooking or soft crinkle cookies, they are a real treat for the palate. This is due to their chewy and slightly sticky consistency, due to the fact that they contain a lot of sugar whipped with barely soft butter. When it comes to storage, in this case, it is essential to keep the characteristic of softness intact. It's very easy: all you have to do is insert a slice of bread into the container in which you are going to store the biscuits  and then make sure to close everything hermetically (humidity is the worst enemy of cookies in general, which is why they are usually stored in airtight tin containers).

The two elements together, in fact, compensate each other because cookies contain a lot of sugar and therefore absorb humidity from the surrounding air, while bread tends to release its humidity into the air, which is why cookies in the open become soft and bread hardens. Placed together in an airtight container, cookies naturally absorb the humidity released by the bread, remaining soft as if they had just been prepared. To keep your chewy cookies in perfect condition, regularly change the slice of bread when you see that the slice is now dry.

How to Store Dry and Crumbly Cookies

The situation is completely different when we talk about cookies with a dry, crunchy and crumbly consistency, those that when you bite into them almost have to resist, such as shortbread, the classic snickerdoodles biscuits or pecan sandies. In this case, preserving them means maintaining their consistency: in contact with air, in fact, this type of cookie not only softens, losing the characteristic that makes them so tasty, but also takes on an unpleasant stale taste. To ensure that dry cookies remain so, all you have to do is prevent the sugar they contain from absorbing humidity, their worst enemy. So store your cookies in a box with a perfectly hermetic seal, for example a tin box lined with baking paper or a glass jar, which you will then place in a cool, dry place, away from direct sources of light and heat. Remember not to mix different consistencies and fillings of cookies but to provide a different container for each type you have cooked.

How to Store Decorated Cookies

As for the cookies that you have enriched with decorations, you need to take a few extra precautions depending on the type of decoration you have used. For cookies covered with sugar paste, the ideal would be to first close each cookie in an individual bag so as to keep the decoration intact, then insert each bag into boxes but without squashing the cookies too much otherwise the sugar paste would deform. If you have used royal icing instead, once it has perfectly and completely hardened you can place the cookies in the airtight box but separating each layer with sheets of baking paper so that, even if overlapped, the icing does not get ruined.

Can Homemade Cookies be Frozen?

If you have prepared too many cookies or want to have them ready for the future, you can use the freezer: yes, homemade cookies can be frozen, both raw and unbaked or already baked. To freeze your cookies, all you need are freezer bags with a sealed zip lock, ideal for preventing air or ice from getting inside the bag. It would be best to place the cookies in a single layer, without overlapping, so that they do not stick together: this would be a risk when defrosting because, in separating them, you could end up breaking them. Even in this case, remember that the cookies must be completely cooled before being bagged, otherwise humidity will accumulate in the bag, which is harmful to the fragrance and consistency.