19 Feb Honey Recipes – Old Fashioned German Honey Cookies

What Are They?

These are tasty treats that are simple to make with minimal ingredients. If you are interested in the history of this recipe, check out https://germanfoods.org/german-food-facts/german-holiday-baking-traditions-rooted-in-history/ .

This recipe adapts an old fashioned traditional cookie to modern dietary restrictions.

Don’t eat eggs? No problem!

Substitute 2TBSP freshly ground flax seeds for eggs when making baked goods.

Gluten-free? No problem!

Substitute rice flour for white flour.

Want occasional sweets but not all the refined sugars? No problem!

You can use honey as a substitute for sugar in baking, and you can also swap the heavily refined table sugar for a more natural product, like coconut sugar.

How to Use Honey in Baking

You can substitute refined processed table sugars with raw BM Dooney Farms Honey in all your baking! There are a few tricks to know about honey to make sure your recipe still turns out.

• Honey is sweeter than sugar so use 3/4 C honey for every 1C sugar.
• Honey is liquid so for every 1C honey cut 1/4C liquids elsewhere.
• Honey is denser than sugar so add a pinch of baking soda to increase rising.
• Honey is viscous so oil your measuring cup to make sure you measure accurately.
• Honey browns faster than sugar so turn down the temp 25F to keep it golden.

What Is Coconut Sugar?

Sometimes you just cannot substitute all the sugar in a recipe with honey, due to all the unique things listed above. In that case, try using coconut sugar. Substituting coconut sugar for white sugar makes for a slightly healthier alternative when making cookies since the glycemic index for white sugar = 60, coconut sugar = 54. It is also a better choice for you because it requires minimal processing to make compared to table sugar. If you are not familiar with how table sugar is made, it is basically from either sugar cane or sugar beets. The US is the world’s 3rd largest producer of sugar beets, which get pressed and the liquid is mixed with caustic calcium hydroxide (limewater), evaporated by boiling under vacuum, cooled & crystallized. Cane sugars require even more chemical processing, including the use of cattle bones (bone char) as filtration to remove the natural colors, creating the white substance most think of as sugar.

Coconut sugar is made in a natural 2-step process:

1. A cut is made on the flower of the coconut palm and the liquid sap is collected into containers.
2. The sap is placed under heat until most of the water has evaporated.

The end product is brown and granulated, similar to raw sugar, but the particle size is typically smaller.

But don’t kid yourself that coconut sugar is healthy – it is still largely without any nutritional value, just empty calories, just like refined white table sugar.

Ingredients

To make the Old Fashioned German Honey Cookies you will need:

• 1 C coconut sugar
• 1 C coconut oil
• 1 C honey
• ¼ C juice of fresh lemon
• 2 TBSP ground flax seed (or 1 egg)
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 4 C flour*

Directions

1. In a saucepan over low heat, melt together sugar, coconut oil and honey. Cool to touch.
2. Mix together the sugar-oil-honey, ground flax seeds (or egg), lemon juice, and baking soda.
3. Slowly add 4 cups of flour to mixture. Stir until well blended. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto a baking stone** or cookie sheets about 2 inches apart.
4. Bake @ 350F 12-15 minutes.
5. Enjoy! They are chewy when hot, and are great for dunking in coffee!

*Make it gluten-free by substituting rice flour for white flour.

**The baking stone yields the best results, with fluffier cookies.

Have you tried these? Let us know! Leave a comment down below.