Planning to bake and ship a little love this holiday season?
If you want to make sure your cookies don’t end up as crumbs by the time they get to your friends and family, the type of cookies you make can be as important as how you wrap and pack them.
Here’s what you need to know:
The cookies
Experts were reluctant to herald one variety of cookie over another, but all agree that sturdiness is key. This isn’t the time for brittle, delicate or thin-cut cookies with intricate woven sugar decorations.
However it is shipped, your package will travel along sundry conveyer belts, be exposed to hot and cold, get handled by several people and possibly rattle for many miles in the back of a truck.
The UPS Store has compiled a list of baked goods its shippers say can take the tumbling and temperatures.
They recommend molasses, peanut butter and sugar cookies, shortbread, brownies and biscotti, and puffed rice treats.
Think small. Small, thick cookies are less likely to break than large, thinner cookies.
Don’t mix soft and hard cookies.
Frosted cookies ship fine, if you use royal icing, a decorating icing made from powdered sugar, egg whites and lemon juice. Use meringue powder (available at most craft and baking stores) instead of the raw egg whites called for in most recipes.
The packing
The key to shipping cookies it to wrap each one separately. This help cushion the cookies, prevents them from sticking together and allows you to ship a variety of cookies without the flavors mixing.
For the wrapping, there are plenty of options: Parchment paper can create sleeves or envelopes for each, which also could be attractively tied with ribbon.
If reshness is a concern, consider cling wrap or press-and-seal-style wraps, which lock out the air and lengthen the life of baked goods.
Once wrapped, the cookies should be arranged (don’t crowd) in a small box or canister. If there is extra space in the box, use crumpled waxed paper, which cushions and helps absorb excess moisture.
Or take The UPS Store’s creative advice and recycle Pringles potato chip cans. Cut your cookies to be slightly smaller than the diameter of the can, then stack them (separated by rounds of parchment paper) in the can.
The smaller box or container of cookies then should be placed inside a larger shipping box that is filled with packing peanuts or other packing material.
Aim for at least 2 to 3 inches of packing around the container of cookies.
The rules
The most important rule is to take your time, said Marc Haymon, a baking instructor at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.
Baking and shipping on the same day is bad; the cookies will stick or be too moist.
Haymon advises baking the cookies the evening before mailing them, which gives them about 12 hours to set up.
Neither the U.S. Postal Service nor UPS has restrictions about what foods can be shipped, but they do share some standard holiday fears, such as candy canes stuffed in business-sized envelopes, which jam letter-sorting machines.
The day of the week matters when shipping food. The pros ship Mondays and Tuesdays to ensure the packages arrive before the weekend, when the cookies could end up sitting in a warehouse until the next week.
The mailing
The Postal Service offers three categories for shipping packages: express, priority and standard.
Express is fastest, but costs a lot more, while priority mail generally will get the cookies to their destination in two or three days.
The Postal Service encourages customers to use its priority, flat-rate boxes, which come in two sizes, can hold up to 70 pounds and cost $8.95 to mail anywhere in the country.
UPS recommends shipping by air, not ground, because fewer people will handle the package and it’ll get to its destination faster. It, too, can air ship a package of cookies in one to three days.
FedEx home delivery program uses ground service, which takes longer, but its FedEx Express will ship a package in one to three days.
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