When Life Gives You Stale Cookies, Make More Baked Goods

Having too many cookies may seem like a good problem to have, but if you're not able to finish them up in time, both the store-bought and home-baked kind can get a bit stale. While stale cookies are still edible and are definitely better than no cookies at all, what we like best is to repurpose slightly-past-their-prime foods into newer and arguably even better versions of their former glory. Just as spoiled (or soured) milk can be used in baking and dry bread can find new life in crouton form, so can stale cookies be used to make unexpected treats like a cookie-filled cookie that you make by wrapping an Oreo in chocolate chip cookie dough and then baking it.

If you prefer something a bit more standard, you can always crumble up the stale cookies and stir them into a second batch of cookie batter. These cookie-chip cookies could have some extra crunch, plus the addition may help stretch the batter to make a few more cookies. You could stir those cookie crumbs into cake batter, too, to make a cookies-and-cream-type cake. Or you could sprinkle them on the bottom of a pan before adding the cake batter, or crumble them over the top of a frosted cake. In each case, the texture of the stale cookies will be negated not only by rendering them into crumbs but also by other elements such as cake and frosting that will contribute to the overall texture of the dish.

One of the more common ways to repurpose stale cookies is to grind or crush them into very fine crumbs, mix them with melted butter, and then press them into a pie pan to make a crust that can be used for pies, tarts, and cheesecakes. A slightly more out-of-the-cookie-jar idea involves breaking the cookies up into large chunks and using them in place of bread for what would instead be a cookie pudding. If you do this using a standard bread pudding recipe, though, you might want to dial back on the sugar a bit since cookies are already quite sweet on their own.

Yet another idea for stale cookies is to toss them into the food processor with sweetened condensed milk and butter and puree them into a Biscoff-type cookie butter. While cookie butter can be used for making cakes, pies, and quick breads, for double recycling points, you can always use your recycled cookie butter to bake up a batch of redundantly delicious cookie butter cookies. In fact, you could even go for the trifecta and add some stale cookie crumbs or chunks to the cookie butter cookie batter. Should you then have any of these cookies left over, well, you can just reuse them to repeat the process ad infinitum.