The Budget-Friendly Old-School Cookies You Can Make With A Loaf Of Bread

When you're craving something sweet, there's nothing quite like a cookie. However, many store-bought cookies leave something to be desired, and homemade soft, chewy, bakery-worthy cookies take a while to make. Luckily, there's a simple recipe that only takes a few basic ingredients. Best of all, it's completely done in less than an hour. Treat yourself to an inexpensive sweet that's over a century old, and make some cinnamon toast cookies.

To make these odd but delicious cookies, you only need sugar, cinnamon, butter, and a loaf of bread. You can use either fresh or stale. Cut the bread into small squares like croutons, triangles, or thin strips. Melt the butter and combine with the cinnamon and sugar. You can even use Cinnamon Toast Crunch seasoning rather than making your own blend if you want a cereal-themed twist. Fully coat your bread with the cinnamon sugar blend, and lay it out on a lined baking sheet. Bake until the bread gets golden brown and crisp, and keep in mind that it will become more crunchy as it cools. 

What you'll end up with is a crispy, sweet, and cinnamon-filled cookie without ever needing to crack an egg or measure flour. You can store these cookies for up to two weeks in airtight containers. It's worth noting that many claim the cookies actually taste better the next day, once the flavors have settled together. 

Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal (which, by the way, isn't the worst cereal for you) may have been around since 1984, but cinnamon toast cookies date back even further. The combination of cinnamon and sugar on toast in and of itself can be traced to Italy in the 1400s. Slices of bread were toasted, buttered, and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, then topped with a slice of cheese to create a cinnamon-flavored grilled cheese sandwich– if you can imagine that odd flavor combination.

By shortly before the Great Depression, cinnamon toast had gained a few other variations, including ones made in frying pans. Some of these recipes that folks still have from relatives involved candying the sugar and cinnamon over heat. Other versions involved serving the toast warm or with apple sauce. 

It was around this time that a crunchy, cookie-like version arose as well. The 1923 recipe explained that you can make cinnamon toast by mixing either brown sugar or powdered sugar (which you can make from scratch) with cinnamon and butter, then coating the morsels of toasted bread with it and baking until the sugar has melted. Unlike previous recipes, this version of cinnamon toast involved cutting the bread into small strips or bite-sized portions — much like the cinnamon toast cookies we know of today.