So there was while last year when Girl was trying to avoid sugar. Girl has never been a huge fan of sweet things anyway, but she was trying to avoid any sort of processed sugar as a sort of dietary experiment. Not long after, I was wandering through the bizarre Bargain/Asian/Mexican grocery store down the street from where I lived in Durham, and came upon this:
Powdered honey.
Powdered Honey.
Long has it been standard to substitute honey for sugar in recipes, but generally you have to account for the added moisture and acidity and change the ratio of flour and baking soda/powder to compensate, and I’m only a novice baker now, so last year at this time I was barely a novice’s apprentice, so substitutions were a bit out of my league.
But here. Honey, but dry like normal sugar. Surely this would require very little thought. I could do something nice for Girl while keeping cane sugar out of the equation. I could make… honey cookies.
So I did. And they were good. Girl loves these cookies. I’ve made this recipe a few times since, and have even gone back to that store in Durham after moving to Charlottesville simply because I can’t find the powdered honey anywhere else. They’re super nomworthy cookies. So today, as I just made another batch, I have decided to share the recipe with you. Not that it will do you any good if you can’t find the powdered honey. Folks in Durham are all set.
Honey Butter Cookies
- 1 cup unsalted butter
- 1.5 cups cactus honey powder
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 2.75 cups AP flour
- .5 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp baking powder
- pinch of salt (I suppose if you use salted butter, you could skip this)
A quick note: these are not healthy cookies by any means, as you can see. I mean, there’s almost a tablespoon of butter PER COOKIE. I set out to make cookies without sugar. I never promised healthy.
Pre-heat your oven to 375F. Get a couple sheet pans, line them with parchment paper and put them aside. Don’t put them on top of the stove, where they can get hot from the oven, because then the cookies will melt before they have a chance to bake. Put them on a chair or something.
Make the butter soft. I usually forget this bit and pull the butter out of the fridge right as I’m ready to start making the cookies. Luckily, I have metal bowls and a gas stove. I put the one on the other and apply a tiny bit of fire, and I chop up my two sticks into the warming bowl. Once they’re just barely starting to melt, I kill the heat and move the bowl to the counter; the next step will finish the softening process, and the whole thing will be plenty cool before the egg goes in.
Throw the powdered honey in the bowl on top of the butter. Mix it up until it’s that weird buttery grainy paste that starts all cookie recipes. I like to use a hand-held pastry blender for this bit. If you have a KitchenAid mixer, set it to “cookiemake” and let it do its thing. Throw in the egg and vanilla (not too hard, or you’ll end up with egg on your shirt).
Throw all the dry things into a blender or food processor and give them a quick spin; this gets a nice, even distribution of all the sodas and powders and things, for better assuring cookierise. Sifting together is also an option, but ever so slow. You could also just skip this bit, but I won’t vouch for your results. Put the dry stuff on top of the buttery sweet mess and mix it all together. It will seem weirdly dry, like you maybe did something wrong. This is normal.
Pick up some of the seemingly dry and crumbly mix into your hand and press it together. Hey look! It forms a ball! It’s like play-dough! IT IS. Wonderful, edible play-dough. Though if you have an intolerance/aversion to raw eggs, you might want to bake it before edible-ing it.
Shove a hand into the dough. Grab a small fistfull and squeeze it into a ball. In terms of size, you want the balls to be somewhere along the ping pong ball / golf ball spectrum. Place the balls on the parchment with a bit of room. This recipe usually yields about 18 cookies at the aforementioned size, so 9 per pan is perfeck, or 10 and 8, or 12 and 6, it’s really up to what makes you, and your pans, feel the most comfortable.
Bake for 6 minutes. Pull the pans out and use a fork to do that fun squash-squash thing on them (like you do with peanut butter cookies); they should yield to your fork like what they are — warm butter thickened with flour. Swap the pans (put the one that was on the top rack on the bottom rack, and vice-versa) and bake for another 4 minutes or so. Pull them out and let them cool on the pans for another couple minutes, then transfer them to a cooling rack. WARNING: cookies will not only burn you if you attempt to eat them straight out of the oven, but will also not taste nearly as good as if you give them a good fifteen minutes to firm up. So HANDS OFF, MEESTER.
Once they’ve cooled, try not to eat more than two (TABLESPOON OF BUTTER PER COOKIE). Put them away, chile. Save them for a special treat, like after you finish washing all those dishes.
Yes, it’s pretty much a basic sugar cookie recipe; I don’t doubt you could throw normal sugar in and have a perfectly respectable sugar cookie come out the other side. But because these are made with honey powder, the sweetness takes a back seat, and the flavor of the butter really shines through. I recommend using some decent organic stuff, because pretty much the whole point of these cookies is to have a legitimate and portable way to eat a big hunk of sweet, tasty butter.
Once in the past I have grated up (microplane grater!) some fresh ginger and added it to the mix, but I don’t recall how much. Probably not enough. If I do it again, I’ll post an update.
If you like your cookies a little on the sweeter side, when you pull them out to forksquish em, drizzle some (liquid) honey across the tops. Not too much, now, we’re not making honey dumplings in honey sauce (though… damn, maybe we should).
I have also considered reducing the amount of flour in the recipe to 2.66 cups, but am unsure as to whether this would be enough of a change as to negate the structural stability of the cookies. Again, if there are any technological developments in regards to this recipe, I’ll be sure to let you know.
Cookies!