The Art of Pest-Free Holiday Baking

The holiday season is packed with all kinds of traditions, and one of the most popular — not to mention delicious — is baking some holiday treats! Cookies, brownies, and cakes are in abundance this time of year. Whether you’re baking a dessert for your family or bringing in plates of cookies to the office party, it’s fun to create sweet treats during the colder months. Unfortunately, the influx of homemade food and time spent in the kitchen will invite more than just a jolly feeling to the season. Pests of all kinds love our food, so they are immediately attracted to our busy kitchens. If there are any open ingredients or unsealed sweets left out, they will draw in hungry pests who will never willingly leave. It is essential to stay vigilant against pests in the kitchen, so let’s discuss some of the best ways to ensure that your holiday desserts don’t have any surprise ingredients (aka insects) inside.

Inspect The House’s Interior

Throughout the holiday season, we recommend checking some of the basic features of your home’s interior for any imperfections. By this, we mean the walls, pipes, doors, and windows. If there are any cracks and gaps in these areas, pests will use these as their entry points into the house. Insects and spiders can clearly fit through these tiny gaps, but even small rodents can squeeze through holes the width of a dime. With holiday baking in mind, inspecting the kitchen for any of these possible entry points is an important part of the process. You can have the best food storage containers (more on that later), but they won’t do much good if there are any entry points leading straight into your kitchen. 

Check the walls and counters for any new cracks, and seal small imperfections with caulk. If your sink or faucet is leaking, have it repaired as soon as possible. Some pests, like roaches and earwigs, need excessive moisture to survive and will be drawn to the leak. December definitely has a chill to it, so you probably aren’t opening up the house as often anymore. But with the kitchen heating up due to the increased usage of your oven and stove, opening up the window a crack doesn’t sound so bad anymore. Check the screens of your windows and sliding doors for any holes before opening them. Smaller imperfections can be patched with extra screen material, but you may want to replace the full screen if there are multiple holes.

Make Sure The Ingredients Are Sealed

This tip starts at the very beginning of the baking process, when you are choosing all of your necessary ingredients at the grocery store. Pests can invade most types of basic containers that baking ingredients come in, like plastic bags and cardboard boxes. They are far more likely to invade damaged containers because any gaps or holes provide easy access to smaller pests, like beetles and ants. As you choose your groceries from the store shelves, give each item a quick visual scan to make sure that there aren’t any holes or rips. This is a good practice to get into regardless of the season, but with the frequent grocery shopping you are likely doing this month, it’s ideal to ensure that everything you purchase is in pristine condition.

Once you bring everything home and keep the ingredients in your kitchen, it is still important to keep an eye out for any pest activity. Check each item for any signs of pantry pests, like jagged holes in packaging and tiny insect eggs. If you are using something that has been stored in the pantry for months (looking at you, flour), inspect it even more closely because pantry pests will invade food that is left alone for a long time. We recommend storing all of the leftover baking ingredients in airtight containers rather than in their vulnerable original packaging. Flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa powder, and powdered sugar are the most common ones in this instance. You can use either glass or Tupperware containers for these items, as the most important element is that they have a lid with an airtight seal. 

Check The Expiration Dates On Everything

This one sounds obvious, but it is still important enough to emphasize. No one wants to use (or eat) expired ingredients in a dessert, especially since the food served this time of year is even more delectable. But beyond the objective statement that expired foods aren’t great, there is also the risk of pests. The longer that opened food sits in your pantry or cabinets, the more likely they are to attract pests at some point. Even baking essentials, like flour and sugar, are attractive to hungry pests. Some of the most common invaders include ants, Indian meal moths, weevils, and roaches. 

The first step to having a pest-free pantry is to clear out anything that is leaking or too gross to use. These will definitely attract creepy-crawlies to the premises because they can access the food very easily. Check all of your stored ingredients to ensure they are sealed and not past the expiration date. We recommend transferring all of your baking essentials to airtight containers in order to keep them fresh and protected throughout the year. If you want to be thorough, you can write the expiration date of the ingredient on a sticky note and put it on the bottom of the airtight container. The specific containers are your choice, but the most important feature to look for is that they have a good seal with an airtight lid. All of the typical baking ingredients can be stored in these, especially flour, sugar, baking soda, cornmeal, nuts, and dried fruit. 

Clean As You Go

Now, onto the actual baking process. If you are baking multiple recipes in one day — like for the neighborhood cookie party — it’s a good idea to clean as you go. But whether you prefer to save everything for the end or to tidy up after each step, we highly recommend doing a good cleaning of the kitchen at the end of the process. You may be surprised at just how many tiny pests are attracted to the overlooked crumbs in a home. Some pests invade our homes for the food sources alone, so eliminating this temptation will help keep your space pest-free for the long run. Ants, roaches, rodents, and pantry pests will eat any opened foods they can get their hands on, from a minor spill to a full bag of chips. 

The most important cleaning tasks are ones that you likely do already. For one, make sure that all of the trash makes it into the trash can and is contained in the bag. Also, wipe up all of the crumbs and spills that accumulated throughout the process. The less attractants left on the counter, the more likely your kitchen will stay pest-free. Also, washing all of the dirty dishes as soon as possible is important in preventing pests from being attracted to the food scraps. If you don’t want to wash all of the dishes right away, simply rinse them off with water to remove all of the larger food residue, then wash or load them into the dishwasher when you have time. Finally, cleaning the kitchen floor is a great last step of the baking process. Whether you sweep, vacuum, or mop, make sure to clean up any food that may have dropped onto the floor throughout the day.

Store The Baked Goods Properly

Once all of your treats are out from the oven and completely cooled, the time has come to figure out which of your favorite festive containers should hold these desserts. If you’ve gotten to this point in the blog, you know exactly what we’re going to say: use airtight containers when you can! There are plenty of good options on the market today, many of which have patterns to fit each holiday and popular aesthetic. As long as the container has a good seal with a tight lid, you can use any of them to protect your holiday treats from invasive pests. 

Honestly, the worst thing you can do with your baked goods is to leave them out in the counter without being contained in a secure vessel. This would essentially be an invitation to any nearby pests who are looking for a safe food source, which would be a quick way to ruin anyone’s appetite for holiday treats. You can keep the dessert containers on the counter or in the fridge, whichever makes you feel more comfortable. And as for the plate of cookies that your children leave out for Santa, hungry pests won’t be able to invade the plate that quickly. Just make sure to clean up the plate and any crumbs after your little ones finish gasping over the fact that Santa actually enjoyed their homemade cookies!

Enjoy A Pest-Free Holiday With Green!

There are all kinds of delicious desserts to bake this holiday season, especially if you enjoy the typical holiday flavors. Peppermint, ginger, and eggnog are delicious ingredients to try out in your holiday baking this year, but a far less enjoyable kitchen presence is a pest infestation! Instead of worrying about hungry pests taking over your home, leave the hassle of pest control to the experienced technicians at Green Pest Services. We only use treatments that are completely safe for both people and pets, so you can rest assured that our eco-friendly products will get the job done without leaving toxic chemicals behind. Between our thorough inspections and our customized treatment plans, we guarantee that we will solve your pest issues as efficiently as possible. Contact us today to learn more about how our dedicated technicians will ensure that the only special ingredient in your holiday cookies is pecans, not pests.

Citations

Latyshev, O. (2022, December 1). Keep pantry pests out of baking. Ehrlich. Available at https://www.jcehrlich.com/help-and-advice/blog/occasional-invaders/pantry-pests-holiday-baking (Accessed on November 29, 2023).

Long, A. (2022, November 17). Top ten tips for pest-free holiday baking. Business Wire. Available at https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221117005733/en/Top-Ten-Tips-for-Pest-Free-Holiday-Baking (Accessed on November 29, 2023).

New England holidays may bring pest problems. (2012, November 13). Modern Pest Services. Retrieved November 29, 2023, from https://www.modernpest.com/blog/new-england-holidays-may-bring-pest-problems/ 

Tips for pest-free holiday baking. (2020, November 9). Maggie’s Farm. Retrieved November 29, 2023, from https://maggiesfarmproducts.com/blogs/bug-help/pest-free-holiday-baking

Tips for pest-free holiday baking. (n.d.). Sigma Pest Control. Retrieved November 29, 2023, from https://www.sigmapest.com/pest-control/tips-for-pest-free-holiday-baking/ 

Top tips for pest-free holiday baking. (n.d.). Pest World. Retrieved November 29, 2023, from https://www.pestworld.org/news-hub/pest-articles/top-tips-for-pest-free-baking/