Cookies made with honey?

[Taedareth]

Is there a secret I should know about using honey instead of white sugar in cookie recipes? Normally I haven't had problems, but last night my tray of cookies melted into one big cookie and I'm not sure why.

I have a recipe for conventional gingersnaps. I baked it last night, using
1/2 cup honey instead of the 1 cup white sugar it called for. I know that sugar often adds bulk to cookie/brownie recipes and that honey won't do the same. But I haven't had issues with it in the past.

(Also, although honey is supposedly 3x sweeter than sugar, in my experience using 1/3 cup honey in place of 1 cup sugar just doesn't work. Using 1/2 cup honey for 1 cup sugar adds the right amount of sweetness, imo.)

The other difference is that I used oat flour in place of wheat flour. I added a bit of homemade baking powder (2 parts cream of tartar, 1 part baking soda) to account for the lack of gluten. This seemed to work fine; the cookies/one big cookie rose sufficiently.

Oh and I baked on a stainless steel try instead of aluminum.

Otherwise I followed the recipe and made sure to chill the dough for a couple of hours before baking.

So... any ideas on how to fix my cookies?

[sunshinestarr]

Subbing because I would also like to know,but I have read that when you substitute honey for sugar, you need to bake things at a lower degree because honey burns easily. Not sure if it's true, but I remember reading that recently.

[cristeen]

I've never had luck using a straight sub of oat flour for wheat, specifically because oat doesn't hold together as well, so I can't really speak to that.

But as for the honey, you're increasing the liquid in the recipe by subbing honey, which means you need to decrease it somewhere else. That can be difficult, since most cookie recipes don't actually have much liquid to begin with. That's why the cookies all ran together, when they heated up, the honey liquefied, and there wasn't enough flour to hold it in place.

The easiest thing to do would be to find a recipe that calls for honey or maple syrup as the sweetener and just change the flavors. Or the ladies here might have some tried and true honey-sweetened cookie recipes. But just subbing honey in cookies is not that easy.

Although I suppose you could always turn your cookies into bar cookies.

[Taedareth]

It is true that honey burns more easily than sugar, but normally that hasn't been a problem for me. Sometimes I turn down the heat a tad, but any lower and things turn out either gooey in the center or dried out.

Great sleuthing, Cristeen! I think you must be right about the liquid content! Hmmm maybe I'll try using less honey and adding a dash of stevia powder.

Very true that oat flour is more crumbly than wheat. Ways to solve that include: 1) use a mixture of oat flour and something really starchy like rice or tapioca flour 2) add an extra egg 3) add a little freshly-ground flax meal.