This $5 Tool Will Keep Your Sugar Soft for Months at a Time

It’s a tale as old as time. You’re in the mood for chocolate chip cookies, so you gather your flour and your eggs, your butter and your vanilla extract. You line your baking sheets with parchment paper and you preheat your oven. Everything is ready to go, but when you open your container of brown sugar, you find that it’s turned into a rock-hard brick of sucrose that would earn a solid 10 on the Mohs scale. At this point, you’re probably pretty tired from collecting the ingredients and the grocery store is far away and dinner is soon, so you abandon your dreams of freshly baked cookies and settle for year-old freezer-burnt ice cream. It’s a sad ending to what should have been a happy day.  

But it doesn’t have to be. There are a few methods you can employ to soften sugar, like damp cloths and slices of white bread, but the most reliable is this adorable bear-shaped terracotta tile, available at Amazon for less than $5.  

Brown Sugar Bear

Brown sugar is white sugar mixed with molasses, which gives it its distinct caramel-like flavor and adds a fair amount of moisture to the mix. When that moisture disappears, so does the pillowy texture. This is where the terracotta tile comes in. To ensure your sugar never dries out, soak the clay in clean water for 20 minutes, pat it dry, and add it to your airtight container. Repeat the process if you notice any clumping, but it should work for three to six months depending on your climate. 

More than 11,500 shoppers credit this bear with keeping their brown sugar soft and their spirits high. One wrote that it’s “definitely worth every penny,” adding that they “have not had a single issue with hard brown sugar” since using the tile. Another commented that “this is so much better” than the bread they used in the past. Their sugar has been soft for “months and months” because of it.

Because this terracotta tile is designed to absorb moisture, it also works in reverse. If you don’t soak it, you can (carefully) add it to bags of pretzels, chips, and crackers to keep your food crispy.   

For such a small and inexpensive item, this bear is impressively versatile. I can practically smell the cookies baking now. 

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At the time of publishing, the price was $4.36.