Hilltop Haven Farms

Tea drinkers love honey. It is the perfect compliment to a steaming hot cup of your English breakfast tea. Limiting honey to just tea or coffee doesn’t begin to realize this wonderful natural sweetener’s potential.

Honey is a very versatile sweet ingredient and can be used for so many recipes from hot and cold beverages, baking, sweets and even savory dishes like beef or chicken.

In fact, you can easily substitute sugar for honey in almost any recipe.

Baking with honey is not the same as baking with sugar.  Honey has more moisture than sugar and browns quicker than sugar. Honey is more acidic than sugar and will change the flavor, often for the better.  Honey baked goods tend to be moister and chewier.  Baked goods with sugar tend to be crisper and have a crumbly texture.

If you convert a recipe from sugar to honey, make the following adjustment (adjustment is not needed if your recipe already contains honey)

• How to measure: Lightly butter or oil your measuring cup when measuring honey for easy removal or use a push-up measuring cup
• Lower your oven temperature down by 25 degrees F
• Decrease your recipe liquids by ¼ cup for every 1 cup of honey in the recipe
• Watch for over-browning, if needed cover with foil
• Add¼ tsp of baking soda for every 1 cup of honey in the recipe (not needed for yeast breads and not needed if your recipe already has baking soda)
• For each egg in the recipe, add extra 2 tbsp of flour
• Use less honey than sugar
• See recipe Notes for Sugar to Honey Conversion

Somehow, somewhere a rumor was started that cooking or even heating honey is toxic and isn’t good for you. Or worse, heated honey is actually poisonous!

I’m not sure how that rumor got started but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Honey is not only perfectly safe once heated, it still retains the many, many fabulous natural health benefits.

Honeybees are simply fascinating. They knew what they were doing when they made honey. That is if you’re using 100% pure, natural, unpasteurized raw honey.

Mass produced honey from the supermarket is most often pasteurized and that process could kill some of the good health benefits of honey. Worse yet, many of those supermarket honeys are mixed from honey from countries like Vietnam, Venezuela and often are not pure. These are often cut with corn syrup.

It is undoubtedly best to buy your honey from a local beekeeper. You can be assured of the honey’s quality and know it came straight from the same bees that you may have seen gathering nectar on the clover blossoms on your yard.

We use honey in many of our recipes at Hilltop Haven. One of my favorites is combining the sweetness of honey with something spicy. For example, try honey and melted butter on toasted cheddar jalapeño bread.

Sweet honey in spicy BBQ sauce is another favorite. The contrast between the heat of the peppers and the sweetness of the honey is unforgettable.

We have five different varieties of honey at Hilltop Haven. We never have and never will add anything to our honey that the bees didn’t put in there.

1. Apple Blossom – a lighter honey with a fruity touch to it with a bit of tang.
2. Wildflower – a honey that is a bit darker with a richer taste
3. Raspberry Blossom – harvested from the nectar of raspberry bushes, it has a slight red tint to it. Sweet and tart but still with all that delicious honey flavor
4. Red Bamboo – A dark, rich honey with a concentrated honey flavor. This is the thickest of our honeys
5. Buckwheat Flower – From the nectar of buckwheat flowers. Like the red bamboo, it is a thick, concentrated honey flavor. I call this and the red bamboo “honey bullion” because you get a lot of honey flavor from just a little honey.

Of these, my favorites to bake with are the red bamboo and buckwheat honeys. A little honey goes a long way to flavor whatever I’m cooking. I do a lot of baking with honey. Breads, cakes and cookies are just that much better with honey.

Honey can be used in just about any recipe, not just those that call for sugar. But honey is healthier and better for you than sugar and it makes sense to substitute honey whenever possible.
But don’t forget to include honey in your savory recipes as well. Honey glazed ham, honey BBQ sauce, honey mustard and so many other possibilities.

Explore, experiment and as always, don’t forget the honey!

We are going to extend this series and start posting a bunch of honey recipes.

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