Holiday baking. You have the music going, the twinkling lights, and visions of ginger and all its friends spreading aromatic joy in your house in the form of baked gingerbread boys. But your brown sugar stash is nearly gone.

Do you have white sugar? Do you have molasses? Then you have brown sugar. No, really. I’m being completely serious.

Put a cup of white sugar in a bowl. Add 1-2 tablespoons of molasses. A little more for dark brown sugar. Grab a fork. Put on some tunes and start mixing.  After a few minutes you’ll have gloppy, sugared chunks of molasses.

Keep going.

A few more minutes and you’ll have the most beautiful, fluffiest, golden pile of brown sugar.

This brings me to the duped part. Many cookie recipes call for a combination of sugar, molasses and brown sugar. Now that you know the latter is made of the first two, you can join me in wondering why it’s listed at all.

Happy holidays everyone.