Honey replaces sugar, but not gram for gram. It sweetens harder, brings water with it, browns faster and makes batters softer. Three rules cover it, then four recipes that work.
The three rules
Count roughly 80 g of honey for 100 g of sugar, and take two tablespoons of liquid out of the recipe, since honey already holds close to 18 % water.
Drop the oven by ten to fifteen degrees. Fructose caramelises earlier than sucrose: at the usual temperature, a honey cake comes out brown on top and raw inside.
Keep your good honeys out of the oven. A Thyme Honey (190 dh) heated to a hundred and sixty degrees loses everything that made it interesting. For baking, take a simple honey like Orange Honey (90 dh); save the others for raw use.
Honey mustard sauce
Two tablespoons of mustard, one of honey, one of cider vinegar, three of oil, salt and pepper. Whisk the mustard and vinegar first, pour the oil in a thin stream, add the honey last.
The sauce keeps several days in the fridge. It goes on chicken, salmon, roast potatoes and winter salads. A characterful honey works very well here, since nothing gets heated.
Honey pancakes
Two eggs, 250 ml milk, 200 g flour, a sachet of baking powder, a pinch of salt, two tablespoons of honey. Mix the honey into the warm milk before adding the flour: it disperses better and you avoid sweet lumps at the bottom of the bowl.
Cook on medium heat, no more. Honey pancakes brown quickly and a high flame burns them before the centre sets. Serve with a drizzle of raw honey on top, Lavender Honey (120 dh) for instance.
Honey biscuits
250 g flour, 100 g soft butter, 80 g honey, one egg, half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. Work the butter and honey together, add the egg, then the flour and bicarbonate.
Rest the dough an hour in the fridge or it sticks. Bake at a hundred and sixty degrees for twelve minutes. The biscuits come out soft and harden as they cool: do not let them brown fully in the oven.
Dates with honey and amlou
The simplest, and the most Moroccan. Stone some dates, fill each with half a spoon of Almond Amlou (90 dh), close them, drizzle honey over and scatter crushed almonds.
Nothing to bake, ten minutes of work, and it keeps a week in a closed box. Serve it with tea, which is where this small dessert belongs.
In a cooking robot
If you work with a heated food processor, set it to thirty-seven degrees to fold in the honey, never higher. Automatic pastry programmes often climb to ninety: add the honey by hand afterwards rather than letting it cook in the bowl.