How to Soften Brown Sugar

Have you ever went to make a recipe, and dug around in your cabinet to find the brown sugar, only to discover that it was like one big rock?

Well, more than I'd like to admit, it's happened to me.

I don't use brown sugar as frequently as I do granulated white sugar, so it tends to sit around a while...and get hard.

I now understand it's because the sugar dries out if the bag or container isn't sealed tightly, or if it's sat around for a long time.

So last week I was making a blueberry coffee cake and needed brown sugar for the crumbly topping. However, it was so hard that I could barely break any pieces off of it.

Then I remembered that years ago, someone told me if homemade cookies got hard and too crunchy, I should put a piece of bread in with them for a few hours, and the cookies would soften up.

So I put my giant lump of brown sugar in a zip top bag with a large slice of bread.

When I checked it a few hours later, my brown sugar was soft and crumbly again!

Look how fluffy and soft the brown sugar is!

Now personally, I wouldn't keep the leftover brown sugar (that I didn't use for my recipe) because I wondered that it might mold with any remaining breadcrumbs.

So if you CAN break a "recipe sized" hunk off to put in a bag with the bread, you wouldn't need to waste the unused portion of your sugar. Just save it for the next time you need it, and use the bread tip!

If you don't have bread on hand and need to soften your brown sugar, I looked up the Domino® sugar site, and they had several other ways to do it. Who knew???