Things bakers know: Store your sprinkles in this surprising place
For the brightest sprinkles, you gotta chill.
Date
August 20, 2025
When you’re adding sprinkles to your ice cream or folding them into a birthday-themed bake, you’re probably heading to the pantry to grab a jar. But what if we told you our Test Kitchen recommends storing them next to your ice cream pints instead?
“For maximum shelf life, it's advisable to store sprinkles in a cool, dark, dry place. And it doesn't get much cooler, darker, or dryer than your home freezer,” explains Recipe Developer David Turner.
While working at Milk Bar earlier in his career (and baking hundreds of Funfetti-inspired sheet cakes), he noticed that the sprinkles were stored in the freezer rather than a room-temperature pantry shelf. This move not only avoided the heat and humidity of a large bakery production kitchen, giving the sprinkles a longer shelf-life, but also improved their overall bake-ability.
“My guess is that someone had the bright idea to freeze the sprinkles on a hunch that it would help prevent color bleeding, a common problem when baking with sprinkles,” notes DT." And it turned out to be true!” Our Test Kitchen has since adopted this storage tip, and found that keeping sprinkles cold prevents colors from running when folding sprinkles into wet batters, like coffee cake or blondies.
It also helps those colors stay brighter. When baking with sprinkles (and specifically naturally colored ones), the Test Kitchen often found those vibrant colors would fade during a stint in the oven. But after employing this quick storage trick, they retained their bright, saturated colors much better.
DT explains just why this works: “Moisture from a dough or batter and the heat of the oven causes sprinkles to soften, particularly sprinkles made with natural vegetable-based dyes, which in turn causes their colors to bleed into batters.”
Adding frozen sprinkles — which are drier than room temperature ones — to your batter will delay softening, causing the sprinkles to bleed less and preserve their vibrancy. What's cooler than that?
Once your sprinkles are frozen, try this technique in our Small-Batch Birthday Cake Blondies.
Cover photo by Patrick Marinello; food styling by Yekaterina Boytsova.
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