Mum shares her simple, mind-blowing trick for keeping your brown sugar soft with a marshmallow

Professional and home bakers alike will relate to the struggle of dealing with a brick-hard chunk of brown sugar – but one mum has discovered a simple trick that will ensure your sugar remains soft and separate.

Angela, from Canberra, was sick and tired of shovelling into her packet of brown sugar every time she wanted to bake something.

Brown sugar is made by mixing molasses with granulated sugar, and hence hardens when exposed to air as the molasses loses its moisture.

The loss of moisture results in sugar crystals sticking to themselves.

But Angela combats this by placing a marshmallow into her brown sugar to replace the lost moisture. 

The mum was overjoyed when she uncovered the secret to saving her brown sugar. 

‘If you put a marshmallow in with your brown sugar it stops the sugar going hard!’ she wrote in a Facebook post.

‘I wasn’t sure if this would work, but it does!’

Angela also revealed that her current marshmallow had been in her container for months without developing even a speck of mould. 

‘I’m really surprised that it’s still soft to the touch,’ she said.

Other mums shared similar tricks to prevent brown sugar from turning hard.

‘If you have a food processor or a blender, you can throw it in and break it up that way,’ one said.

‘I use a slice of bread or even just the corners – but the bread does create mould.’

‘You can also use a piece of potato.’

Brown sugar is made by mixing molasses with granulated sugar, and hence hardens when exposed to air as the molasses loses its moisture (stock image)

But some were worried about cross contamination and allergens.

‘Just be careful if you’re serving coeliacs – marshmallows contain gluten.’ 

‘Oh no, new food allergy unlocked,’ one woman wrote.