Cooking with Honey

So, as I've repeatedly mention, my hubby is a honey fanatic.  He loves it on anything and everything and sometimes can be caught eating a spoonful directly from the jar.  So, with our recent successes with bees and a honey harvest, I've decided to try dabbling in cooking with honey.  So, you'll probably see quite a bit of posts with honey involved in the next few months.

Since I wasn't really feeling that great last weekend I was pretty much tied to the house.  So I figured it was a great time to start experimenting.  I'd gotten this great honey cookbook while in Savannah at the Savannah Bee Company shop.  This is an amazing company, I definitely recommend visiting their website, or by all means, check out their shop in Savannah.  It's totally worth the trip!

So, I quickly flipped through and found a simple sounding recipe for Honey Oatmeal Cookies.  I gathered all the ingredients and made a few adjustments based on what I had in the house.  The recipe called for peanuts and I substituted pecans.  Peanuts or boring and pecans just seem more Southern to me.  And I substituted chocolate chips for the raisins that were originally in the recipe.  I don't really like raisins, so rarely have them in the house.  I contemplated using dried cranberries, but figured chocolate chips would go over better with the hubby.

The honey looked really pretty as it was being added to the mixture.

And using honey instead of sugar totally made the texture different.  Look at that creamy goodness!

The cookies turned out perfect.  That had a really light and airy texture.  Not at all as heavy as the other recipes I usually use and they had a little bit of a sweet coating on them as well from the honey.

Yep, they definitely got the seal of approval from the hubby and I even liked them even though I'm not a big honey fan.

Now, those of you that know my hubby know that besides honey, he loves blackberry pie.  Since I hate making pie crust he usually gets blackberry cobbler.  I'd made a blackberry cobbler two days before that had already disappeared (not that I had any).  So I decided to go back to that lovely honey cookbook to see what I could find.

What I found was apple crisp.  We have a TON of apples from our trees and I hadn't made anything with them yet, so that seemed like a logical solution.  They're really tart and shiny and beautiful and I'm so proud of my hubby for his success with the orchard (I'm calling it that now).

Super simple recipe, pour in the most important ingredient........

I swear my hand isn't that giant, it's just some tricky angle.

Top it with the crunch crust ingredients.......

Bake until it's a nice gooey, golden brown.....

Now, this was a little too much honey for me ( I like my honey hidden so I can't taste it).  But it looked amazing.  It was all bubbly and beautiful and got a positive review from the honey lover in the household.

I do think I'd peel the apples next time just because those particular apples have a bit of a tough skin and I think it would help to make everything blend.  Overall, I'm liking the cooking with honey sofar.  Everything seems like it's a bit lighter and not so sugary sweet.

Note:  I'm not sure why it appears as though I was cooking in a dark black cave, but the lighting was not being cooperative that day.  :(

Happy Experimental Cooking!