Elaborate cookie cutters can be festive and fun, but they also can be fussy. All the fine edges and frills they create burn easily before thicker sections of the cookies have time to cook. After her 3-year-old son begged her to buy a giraffe cookie cutter, Shaina Westhoff, of Salem, South Dakota, wondered whether there’s a way to bake cookies without burning delicate tails, legs and necks.

At Milk Street, we’ve tried numerous strategies for preventing elaborately shaped cookies from having their fragile bits burned during baking. We’ve underbaked the cookies, hoping they’d finish cooking with residual heat. We’ve lowered the oven temperature and baked them slightly longer. And we’ve stressed to make sure we roll out the cookies as evenly as possible and no less than ¼ inch thick. But no method worked as reliably as a simple shield of foil.

Covering a cookie’s tender edges with foil during baking protects them just enough to keep them from browning before the rest of the treat is done. But for a shape as tricky as a giraffe—with its long neck, pointy snout, tiny ears, wispy tail and spindly legs—we needed a more efficient way to protect our cookies. Our solution: Another cookie cutter. We used a round cutter slightly smaller than our giraffe to punch circular holes into sheets of foil. The holes in the baking overlays exposed the thicker centers of the cookies, but covered the delicate edges. The result is that the head, tail and hooves bake at the same rate as the bodies.

See here for more cooking tips inspired by questions on our radio show, and find more from Milk Street Magazine here.

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Illustration: Ross MacDonald