The Chewy Molasses Cookie
How they hold up over three days
Okay. Your cookies are baked, they've cooled, and now the actual question, the one that matters if you're taking these to an exchange: do they still taste good on day three, sitting in someone else's kitchen, in a tin they've forgotten about since Tuesday.
This is where a lot of good cookies fall apart. Not literally. They just go stale, or they go hard, or they go weird and gummy in a way that wasn't there on day one. Molasses cookies, done right, are actually one of the better cookies for this. That's part of why I keep making them for exchanges. But "done right" is doing some work in that sentence.
Why molasses cookies keep better than most
Molasses is hygroscopic, meaning it holds onto moisture. That's the whole reason these cookies stay chewy instead of turning into crackers. A sugar cookie or a shortbread doesn't have that going for it, so it dries out faster, especially in our air. We're dry here to begin with, and December heating makes it worse. Your furnace is running, the air in the house is drier than the air outside most days, and cookies sitting out on a counter are losing moisture the whole time.
So the molasses is working for you already. What you do after baking either helps that or undoes it.
Storage: the part people get wrong
Here's the mistake I see constantly. People bake a beautiful batch, let them cool completely, which is good, and then put them in a container that isn't actually sealed. A cookie tin with a loose-fitting lid is basically just a plate with walls. Air's getting in.
You want something that seals. A container with a gasket, or a zip-top bag with the air pressed out, or plastic wrap pressed directly against the cookies, not just draped over the top of the container. I use those rectangular locking-lid containers, the kind with the four latches. Fifteen dollars at a store you already shop at, and it does more for cookie life than almost anything else you'll buy.
Layer with parchment or wax paper between layers so they don't stick together or transfer moisture unevenly. Don't stack them warm. I know I say that about basically every step in this cookie's life, but warm cookies stacked on each other steam themselves and you get a soft spot where they were touching and everywhere else is fine. Let them cool flat on a rack first, then stack.
The bread trick
Here's a thing I stole from bread baking, because bread has the same staling problem and bakers have been solving it forever. If you're storing these more than a day, put a slice of plain sandwich bread in the container with the cookies. The cookies pull moisture toward equilibrium with the bread instead of drying out into the air. The bread goes stale, the cookies stay soft. Swap the bread slice out if you're going past three or four days. I feel like this sounds like a rumor but it works, and I don't have a better explanation than the hygroscopic thing again, just applied to bread instead of molasses.
What day three actually looks like, done right
If you've chilled the dough properly, baked it slightly underdone the way I keep telling you to, cooled it flat, and sealed it well, a day three chewy molasses cookie should still bend a little before it breaks. Not soft like fresh dough. Just yielding. If it snaps clean instead of giving, it's gone past what I'd call good, and that's usually an air exposure problem, not a recipe problem.
The freezer, and the dough log mix-up
If you're not baking until the day of the exchange, don't bake ahead and freeze the baked cookies. Baked cookies in the freezer come out weird when thawed, a little spongy in a way that's hard to fix. Freeze the dough instead, in a log, wrapped tight, and slice and bake fresh. This is the single most useful habit I've got for December, because it means I can have dough ready two weeks out and just bake as I need it.
The catch is you have to label your logs. I don't, half the time, and I pay for it. I once pulled a log out of my freezer thinking it was sugar cookie dough, thawed the whole thing, and it turned out to be gingersnap. By the time I figured that out I didn't have time to start over, so dinner that night was gingersnaps. Nobody in my house complained, but it would've been a different story if I'd needed sugar cookies for something specific the next morning. Write on the log. Painter's tape and a Sharpie is all you need.
Before next time
Bring a container to class that you'd actually use for storage, something with a real seal, not just a lid that sits on top. We'll test the bread trick together and see how many of you believe me by the end of it.