Honey in cooking and baking
If you can use honey, it adds a number of advantages to your baking:
Tips for baking with honey
Copyright © Tarja Moles 2012. Photograph © Gjs | Dreamstime.com. All rights reserved.
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Tarja Moles is the author of No Naughties: Sweet Treats without Sugar, Wheat, Gluten and Yeast. Visit www.nonaughties.com for free recipes and information on special diets and living with multiple dietary restrictions.
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- It enhances browning and crispiness. If you use gluten-free flour blends in your baking, you may have noticed that they don’t brown very well. Honey can help to add colour to your treats.
- Honey retains more moisture in cakes and other treats which makes them more succulent.
- Due to its viscosity, honey binds ingredients together. If you’re baking with gluten-free flour, the lack of gluten will prevent the flour from binding. Honey can help to compensate for this to some extent.
- The honey flavour can add to the taste of your treat. However, choose your honey carefully as there are many different varieties and they all taste different.
Tips for baking with honey
- Honey is much sweeter than sugar. When you’re substituting sugar for honey in a recipe, the general guideline is to use about half the amount of sugar. However, some honey varieties are sweeter than others, so you need to adjust the amount accordingly.
- Honey contains more liquid than sugar, so you need to reduce the amount of liquid in the recipe by about 25% of the volume of the honey you’re using.
- Beating and whisking batters containing honey will take longer and needs to be more vigorous than with sugar recipes.
- Honey browns and crisps faster than sugar, so bake your cakes or other treats at a lower oven temperature. 10-20C/25F/1 gas mark is usually recommended.
- Honey is more acidic than sugar. You can help to neutralise it by adding ½ tsp of bicarbonate of soda for every 250 ml of honey you use. This will also help your cakes and other treats to rise.
Copyright © Tarja Moles 2012. Photograph © Gjs | Dreamstime.com. All rights reserved.
If you’d like to use this article in your ezine or on your website, you’re welcome to do so as long as you use the complete article, including the copyright line, and include the following paragraph in its entirety:
Tarja Moles is the author of No Naughties: Sweet Treats without Sugar, Wheat, Gluten and Yeast. Visit www.nonaughties.com for free recipes and information on special diets and living with multiple dietary restrictions.
Back to Articles