50 Uses for Honey: Desserts, Drinks, & Food Recipes

A collection of more than 50 uses for honey, including desserts, drinks, and savory recipes. Honey is a fantastic sweetener that you can use to replace some or all of the sugar in food recipes and help you make them healthier! Also included are ways to use honey as a natural medicine and healing skin care.

Real honey is one of nature’s most delicious natural treats. It’s sweet and sticky, and right now, it might be your favorite for flavoring herbal tea or spooning onto toast or Greek yogurt. It has a lot more than that going for it, though! I’m here to help with more than fifty ways to use it in food and for health. Just eating raw honey is linked to supporting heart health, lowering blood pressure, and preventing heart disease¹. Using it on your skin can help heal wounds² and treat skin conditions like psoriasis³ and eczema.

So indulge yourself with these incredible honey recipes and slather your skin with the good stuff. Raw, beautiful honey is not only delicious but can help you live better! There’s even a little information on how to start beekeeping at the end if you’d like to become more self-sufficient and make your own natural honey.

Tips for Using Honey in Cooking

Real honey is an incredible natural sweetener that you can use right across the board in food recipes. It comes in two main forms: runny honey and solid crystallized honey. Either is great to eat by the spoonful, but to use solid honey in recipes, you may need to heat it up to make it liquid again. Runny honey blends better with the rest of the ingredients in both food and skincare recipes. You can melt honey down in the microwave, or better yet, set the jar in a pan filled with hot water. You can also set the jar in a sunny window sill and over time, the heat from the sun will naturally melt it.

Cooking with honey is safe for most people, but be aware that infants should not be given raw honey. Honey is an effective preservative of microbes, including botulism, and young children can become incredibly sick. If you or a loved one has diabetes, honey is okay to have, but you do need to eat it in moderation. Honey is still a type of sugar, and while it has lower glucose and fructose, it still has a good amount in it. Saying that, raw honey is a healthier sweetener option and doesn’t raise blood sugar as quickly as refined sugar does.

Dessert Recipes Using Honey

If you’re concerned about processed sugar, honey can replace some or all of it in many dessert recipes. Typically, you can substitute a cup of sugar with 2/3 cup of honey, but some recipes work better using this rule than others. These recipes feature honey as a prominent ingredient and flavor in desserts, cookies, and treats.

• Honey & Almond Baklava Recipe
• Honey Funnel Cake Recipe
• Salted Honey Pie
• Honey Lavender Cheesecake
• Lemon Olive Oil Honey Cake

Honey Cookie Recipes

• Lavender & Honey Cookie Recipe (so good!)
• Honey Orange Cookies
• Tahini Shortbread with Salted Honey
• Old German Honey Cookies
• Healthy Raspberry Oatmeal Cookies

Honey Wine & Liqueur Recipes

The natural sugar in honey makes it a great ingredient for drinks—and not just for sweetening tea! Use honey to pep up cocktails, mocktails, lemonade, and liqueurs. If you’re into brewing and fermenting, go the full gamut and make wine. Mead is a sweet wine made with honey and is a sweet and mellow dessert wine.

• Sweet Honeyed Rum with Spices — a delicious autumn shrub
• Spiced Wine with Honey & Ginger
• How to Make a Gallon of Mead (honey wine)
• Lithuanian Honey Liqueur
• Honey & Cinnamon infused Vodka

Honey Candy Recipes

• Homemade Honey Vanilla Marshmallows
• Salted Brown Sugar & Honey Fudge
• Crunchy Sesame & Honey Brittle
• Homemade honey candy
• Honey Lollipops Recipe

Refreshing Honey Drinks

• Homemade Honey Lemonade
• Honey Blackberry Mint Mocktails
• Pineapple Agua Fresca
• Ginger & Honey Iced Tea
• Honey-Ginger Limeade

Savory Honey Recipes

Though honey isn’t a traditional savory ingredient, most of us will have tried a honey-mustard recipe and loved it. Sweet plus spicy is a timeless flavor combo! These ideas will help you get inventive with using honey in main dishes, starters, and bread. You can also use it in desserts, listed further below.

• Roast Chicken with Caramelized Onion and Apple Honey Stuffing
• Crispy Honey Sesame Tofu with rice
• Honey Cilantro Lime Salmon
• Honey Sriracha Chicken Zucchini Zoodles
• Vegetarian ‘Meatballs’ with Soy Sauce & Honey Glaze

Honey Starters & Sides

• Baked Goat Cheese Cigars with Honey & Thyme
• Honey Mustard Garlic Shrimp
• Pear Naan Pizza with Honey Whipped Goat Cheese
• Roasted Root Vegetables with Rosemary & Honey
• Honey Mustard Coleslaw

Honey Bread and Biscuit Recipes

• Honey butter dinner rolls
• Homemade honey & oat bread
• Honey Buttermilk Biscuits

Preserving with Honey

Many preserving and canning recipes call for sugar, but if you’re keen on reducing the white stuff, use honey. It can replace at least part of the sugar content of most jam and jelly recipes and works beautifully in chutneys and sauces. Honey works as a natural preservative, too. It lasts indefinitely, which is why 5000-year-old honey has been found in tombs from ancient times. You can also use honey to preserve other foods and flavors, such as gorgeous herbal honey.

• Blueberry & Lavender jam recipe
• Herb-infused Honey with Herbs & Spices
• Homemade Ketchup with honey
• Fermented Honey Garlic

Honey Skincare Recipes

Honey is a natural humectant, meaning that it pulls moisture from the air to your skin. Aside from its skin healing properties, this property of honey makes it an ideal ingredient for nourishing lotions and creams. It can also work to help tint soap a natural caramel color and makes a great base for gentle skin cleansers.

• Honey & Lavender Soap Recipe
• Honey and Beeswax Soap Recipe
• Handmade Honey Body Butter Recipe
• Organic Aloe Face Cream Recipe
• Gentle Honey Facial Cleanser recipe
• Rose & Honey Hand Cream Recipe

Honey as Medicine

The honey and lemon tea you have when you’re sick isn’t just a comfort—it really can help make you feel better. Honey’s soothing and healing properties soothe sore throats, stop coughing, and even improve sleep. Sislathered over wounds, it can help exclude bacteria and stop infections but also speed up healing. Honey is useful for treating burns, so think about that the next time you hurt yourself while cooking. In the meantime, here are some medicinal honey recipes for you to try:

• Honey can be a natural remedy for colds & flu
• Elderberry Infused Honey (immune boosting)
• Honey Syrup Recipe
• Herbal Honey Throat Spray Recipe

Make Your Own Honey

I started keeping honeybees several years ago and currently have two busy colonies of bees. ‘Primrose’ and ‘Bluebell’ not only pollinate my edible garden but also produce jars upon jars of honey every year. I always leave them enough of their own honey for winter, but they make so much more than they need. That surplus is perfect for making as many honey recipes as I’d like!

Honey is what honeybees make to store as food for the winter. They gather nectar from countless flowers and then process it into the golden ingredient we know and love. Real honey also contains pollen from flowers, and if you eat honey created by bees in your area, it can help with allergies.

I truly believe that more people should take up beekeeping. If you’re already a honey fan and want to help honeybees survive, then it makes sense to learn more. Here’s more information on how to get started keeping bees and making your own honey. If you take up the pursuit, you’ll also have plenty of wax to use, too!

• Getting Started Beekeeping
• How to Extract Honey from Honeycomb
• Is Honey Vegan?

1 Honey linked to preventing heart disease
2 External application of honey linked to healing wounds
3 Honey as a treatment for Psoriasis