Our favourite honey bread recipes

Our favourite honey bread recipes

Whether the weather is keeping you cosily wrapped up indoors, or your commute to the office has become a 30 second stroll over to the kitchen table, we’re all spending more time inside these days. It’s easy to become gloomy as the nights get longer, the days become darker and world news continues to batter aggressively at our doors. As our minds shift from a low-key Summer to a potentially even lower-key Winter, it’s time to make the most of this season.

Picture yourself in soft fluffy socks, a day of home-working behind you and an evening to yourself stretched ahead. Now imagine a hot cup of tea, and the smell of freshly baked bread drifting in from the kitchen…

Honey is an easy, delicious and incredibly healthy ingredient for adding a little extra sweetness to your baking. There are many different varieties to choose from, each with their own flavour and nutritional profiles. So, whatever your honey of choice is, you can find a suitable honey bread recipe using our favourites that we’ve selected below.

All of our recipes follow the same basic steps, so you can mix and match our honeys as you please. However, we reckon we’ve cracked the code and found the perfect honey for each variation:

Honey Oat Bread
We recommend using: Golden Honey

Follow the below recipe, and just lightly brush the top of the dough with some runny golden honey and sprinkle with oats before baking, for a superb finishing touch! Follow the recipe below and add 120g of oats to the dry ingredients.

Honey Banana Bread
We recommend using: Cinnamon Honey

The warm cinnamon notes will compliment the banana bread and help you create the perfect healthy snack. Simply add the mushed bananas into the recipe at the same point as the other wet ingredients.

Honey Bread with Spelt Flour
We recommend using: Golden or Borage Honey

Golden honey has an intensely sweet flavour, whereas Borage is slightly milder. Both will work brilliantly with this bread, which simply follows the recipe down below – just switch the regular flour for spelt flour.

Honey Sunflower Bread
We recommend using: Heather Honey

The sweetest and most luxurious of all our honeys, this is a perfect match for a simple, warming Sunflower loaf, to bring back a touch of Summer. Add 60g of sunflower seeds and 2 tbsp. of olive oil to the ingredients.

Feeling daring? Why not try a slightly more complex dish…

Honey Rye Bread
We recommend using: Rapeseed Honey

For a slightly more sour loaf, we recommend rapeseed as a milder and thicker honey, to help capture that iconic rye taste. You’ll need an extra 200g of rye flour, 75g of black treacle and 2 tbsp. of cocoa powder for this recipe. Just add these accordingly in the same steps as the other wet or dry ingredients. Apart from these little adjustments, the rest of the recipe is the same!

Basic Honey Bread Recipe

Ingredients:

• 250ml water
• 2 teaspoons active dry yeast
• 230ml milk
• 4 tbsp. of your chosen honey
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 25g softened butter
• 600g all-purpose flour

Method:

1) Preheat your oven to around 200C.

2) In a large mixing bowl, dissolve the yeast into the water. Add the softened butter, honey and milk, and any other wet ingredients. Mix together.

3) Add the dry ingredients. If using more than one type of flour, mix these together first. You may find it easiest to mix in the flour bit by bit.

4) Sprinkle some flour onto a clean, dry surface. Place the dough onto the surface and knead. This should take around 10 minutes – you can add more flour as needed to make sure the dough is firm and smooth.

5) Once the dough is thoroughly kneaded, place back into the mixing bowl and cover with a tea towel or cling film. Leave in a dry space, out of direct sunlight. Leave to rise for around 1 hour. (For rye bread, you will need to leave it for 2.)

6) Return to your dough. Now for the fun part: punch the dough down. Turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and continue to knead or punch to ensure all of the air is out.

7) Place into your baking dish and place in the oven to bake for around 30 minutes, or until the top of the bread is golden brown.

8) Once the bread is baked, place on a rack to cool. You may want to drizzle the surface with some more honey.

9) Slice, serve and enjoy. Freshly baked bread is always best on the day, so don’t hesitate

Click the image below to head over to our honey page and pick up your key bread making ingredient today!