Honey is a sweet food substance that is gotten from the sugary secretion of honey bees and other related insects. Honey has sweetness relative to that of sucrose which is common table sugar. Honey gets its sweetness from fructose and glucose. Honey is mostly used in cooking and baking,  as desserts, bread spreads and commercial beverage sweeteners.

Honey is a very interesting food ingredient that is essential in the home. Most people use it for spreads and sweeteners, but there are other interesting ways to incorporate honey into foods. Below are 8 foods that honey can be used to prepare:

1. Cakes and Cookies

The ultra-sweet taste and  gooey texture of honey will come in handy beautifully when making cakes and cookies. Honey, which is even sweeter than sugar has a unique flavor that makes cakes and cookies to stand out. In your cake and cookie recipes, try to replace sugar with honey. You can start by experimenting honey as a substitute; for each 1/4 cup of sugar, replace with one tablespoon of honey. When using honey to bake, pay closer attention to the baking time because honey-based cakes and cookies will often get brown faster than sugar-based ones.

2. Snack Bars

The quality of honey is excellent in making soft chewy candy bar. The ability of honey to retain its moist, sticky and flexible texture after baking makes it a wonderful ingredient in making granola bars, cereal bars and trail mix bars. You can complement the unique texture and sweetness of honey with crunchy nuts and tart dried cherries, this gives snack bars a wonderful flavour. You can easily vary between the sweetness and chewiness of snack bars by increasing or decreasing the amount of honey you put in them.

3. Homemade Bread

When aiming to make a moist homemade bread, make sure the recipe includes honey. Homemade breads like banana bread, corn bread, herbed bread, cheesy bread etc, will benefit from the sweetness and texture of honey. Honey adds a unique, mild flavour to non-yeast breads. Honey gives these breads a savory flavour profile because they are sweet but not too sweet. Honey also acts like a natural preservative making your bread to stay fresh for a longer period of time.

4. Baked Beans

Honey is a wonderful ingredient to use when making baked beans. It is a wonderful ingredient to help sweeten baked beans while producing a taste that is different from the normal taste of baked beans. Honey also impacts interesting variety of flavours to baked beans. Bear in mind that honey can produce a light coloured baked bean so, if you want your baked beans to have a dark look, use the darkest honey you can find. Buckwheat honey is a good option. 

5. Soups

Honey is a wonderful ingredient in making lightly sweet soups like carrot, fruit, sweet potato and squash soups. Honey also makes these soups more complex and balanced. In some soups like parsnip and cauliflower soup, honey adds a bit of sweetness that softens the potential bitterness of the main ingredient. Try to drizzle a bit of honey when cooking your spicy and chili soups to give it a classic taste. Another bonus of honey is its thick consistency. Honey is so viscous and this helps add thickness to the soup.

6. Wine

Honey wine is one of the oldest alcohols in the world and it is still as tasty as ever. Brewing honey wine at home is very simple, all you need is honey, unchlorinated water, wine yeast and a fermentation bucket. This wine gives a variable and distinct flavour and you can make it a unique wine by adding some spices like; cinnamon or nutmeg.

7. Sauces and Salad Dressing

Honey is one of the major ingredients in most salad dressing and sauces. Honey goes very well with pork and barbecue, making it a key ingredient in many homemade barbecue sauces. When grilling your steak, you can try to stir some spoons of honey together with apple cider vinegar, mustard and lemon juice to make a tangy and sweet sauce. In making salad dressing, try adding a few drops of honey to vinaigrette for added sweetness and thickness.

8. Honey Butter

Try using honey as a sweet and rich topping on breads, potatoes or vegetables. Honey butter is one of the easiest and yummiest things to make with honey. It is commonly used in eating baked foods like; corn bread, biscuits, pancakes and muffins. It is a very simple recipe, just whisk four parts of butter with one part of honey. To modify the flavour, you can try adding a bit of vanilla extract or cinnamon.

Try replacing your conventional table sugar with honey because it is more nutritious and confers fewer calories than sugar does. Using honey has many more benefits in comparison to using sugar.  Honey has health benefits like;

• Rich in antioxidant.
• Less risk of diabetes.
• Improves cholesterol.
• Lowers triglyceride content.
• Promotes burns and wound healing.
• Helps suppress cough in children.