50+ Wholesome Uses for Honey in Skincare, Food, and Wellness Recipes (2024)

A collection of more than fifty delicious and creative uses for honey. Make everything from desserts and treats to handmade skincare and medicine

Honey is one of nature’s most delicious natural treats. It’s sweet and sticky and might be your favorite for flavoring herbal tea and greek yogurt. It has a lot more than that going for it though — 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. This collection of creative recipes and uses for honey will give you inspiration on how to use honey every day for skin, food, and wellness.

Uses for Honey in Skincare

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

Ways to Use Honey as Medicine

The honey and lemon tea you have when your sick isn’t just a comfort — it can help make you feel better. Honey’s soothing and healing properties soothe sore throats, stop coughing, and could even improve sleep.

• Honey is one of these
• Sweet Lemon Honey & Thyme Cough Syrup Recipe
• Herbal Honey Throat Spray Recipe
• Immune boosting Elderberry Infused Honey

Preserving with Honey

A lot of 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 Egyptian tombs. You can use honey to preserve other foods and flavors and even use it to make your own homemade granola.

• Homemade Ketchup with honey
• Fermented Honey Garlic

Honey Dessert Recipes

If you’re concerned about processed sugar, honey can replace some or all of it in many dessert recipes. These recipes feature honey as a prominent ingredient and flavor though. The first five are desserts and further below are ideas for honey cookies and treats.

• Honey Lavender Cheesecake
• Salted Honey Pie
• No-churn Honey Rhubarb Ice Cream

Honey Cookie Recipes

• — five stars!
• Honey Orange Cookies
• Tahini Shortbread with Salted Honey
• Old German Honey Cookies
• Healthy Raspberry Oatmeal Cookies

Ways to use Honey in Wine & Liqueurs

The natural sugar in honey makes it a great ingredient for drinks. It’s not just for sweetening tea either! Use honey to pep up co*cktails, mocktails, lemonade, and liqueurs. If you’re into brewing and fermenting, go the full gamut and make wine with it too. 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’
• How to Make a Gallon of Mead (honey wine)
• Lithuanian Honey Liqueur
• Honey & Cinnamon infused Vodka

Treats Made with Honey

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

Alcohol-free 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 of some sort. These ideas will help you get inventive with using honey in main dishes, starters, and bread and you can also use them 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

Starters & Sides Made with Honey

• 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

Bread & Rolls Using Honey

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

Make Your Own honey

I started keeping honeybees several years ago and currently have two busy and buzzy colonies. ‘Primrose’ and ‘Bluebell’ not only pollinate my edible garden but they produce jars upon jars of honey every year too. 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!

I truly believe that more people should take up beekeeping. If you’re already a honey fan already and want to help honeybees survive then it makes sense to learn more. Have a read of these pieces to understand how to get started, see how honey is extracted, and why I think everyone should eat honey.

• Getting started with Beekeeping
• How honey is extracted from the honeycomb
• Why I think Vegans should eat honey

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