Keeping Cookies Soft

That's right.  A slice of bread!

This isn't a recipe but a TIP from a coworker (thanks, Liz!) to keep cookies soft.  You know how it goes.  You bake cookies and they are deliciously warm and soft when they come out of the oven and the following day they are as hard as a rock!  What happened?
Every time my friend would bring cookies to work, she would stick a slice of bread in the container.  Being in the science field, a few of us poked fun at her because it just seemed like such an odd, unscientific addition... that is until our internet researcher (Jess) found out why this works.  Long story short... the sugar in the cookie absorbs the moisture in the container and when the moisture runs out the cookie gets hard.  The bread adds enough extra moisture to the container for the sugar crystals to be happy and keep your cookie soft.

I didn't believe it until I tried it.  I "resuscitated" hard chocolate chip cookies with a slice of room temperature bread in my container for 2 hours.  Then I tried it with fresh cookies to keep them soft.  It sounds ridiculous, but it WORKS!!  Now I have a great use for the ends of the bread loaf.  One caution is that you can OVER moisturize your cookies.  I move the bread around in the container so it is not sitting on the same cookies the whole time.  You'll notice if you don't move it, the cookies underneath become too soft.

Happy Baking!  :)