Sunday Brunch

Sunday Brunch: A Rumbly Tumbly Remedy
17 July 2011

With the conclusion of Winnie the Pooh week to celebrate the July 15^th premiere, Sunday Brunch will be taking a step away from the Disney parks.  While there are some Pooh related dining options at Disney World, such as the Winnie the Pooh and friends character breakfast at the Crystal Palace in the Magic Kingdom, I knew immediately of a better way to celebrate Pooh Week by bringing some of Pooh's favorite food to your kitchen in a fun, quick and easy way.

Our Days of the Week staff writers found Pooh

at the character landing in Animal Kingdom!

One day in my family kitchen in New Jersey, I had a rumbly in my tumbly.  A small smackerel of honey could do the trick!  Pooh is a hungry little bear with little patience to wait for treats, so be it a honey tree or Rabbit's cupboard, he just dives right in and dines. Though those options are not readily available for a honey craving human, there's the next best thing: honey in a bottle!  After I took some time to think, think, think, I figured that drinking honey out of a bear shaped bottle is just a little too sad as demonstrated by Buster here'

I decided I wanted to get a little more creative than that, so I flipped open the cookie book I most frequently borrow from the library and found a recipe for Honeydoodles, a delicious cookie like a Snickerdoodle, but made with honey instead of peanut butter.  I mostly picked this recipe because we had honey and the cupboard and it looked really quick to prepare and bake.  Unfortunately, I do not have the cookie book with me, but I did find this recipe brought to you by the National Honey Board and Dutch Gold Honey.

Honeydoodles
1/3 cup butter, softened
2/3 cup Clover honey
1 egg
1 1/2 cup flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/4 tsp salt
Cinnamon-sugar mixture (2 parts sugar, 1 part cinnamon)

Using an electric mixer, beat butter until light; gradually add honey, beating until light and creamy.  Beat in egg.  In medium bowl, combine flour, baking soda, cream of tartar and salt.  Gradually add to butter mixture, mixing until blended.  With hands, form dough into 1' balls; roll in cinnamon-sugar.  Place on lightly greased baking sheets, about 2' apart.  Bake at 375 degrees F for 10 ' 12 minutes or until golden.  Transfer to wire racks; cool completely.  Yields 3 dozen cookies.

Image from

http://simplyyumfood.blogspot.com/2008/07/honeydoodles.html

Due to the nature of honey, these cookies are incredibly soft, sweet, and tend to spread A LOT.  You can fix this issue by making smaller sized cookie dough portions and reducing baking time.  Honey is a natural invert sugar, meaning that the sugar molecules are arranged in such a way that it remains liquid form for a long period of time, thus providing a lot of moisture.  Invert sugars are actually a sucrose sugar broken up into its components glucose and fructose.  Compared to sucrose, the components are much sweeter in taste.  Invert sugar or syrups are used in the commercially produced soft and chewy chocolate chip cookies in order to give their texture soft properties.  That is why soft and chewy cookies are significantly sweeter than regular cookies.

 So sorry, Owl got in here and started  a discussion on the science of honey!  Thank you for your patience and I hope that you remedy your rumbly tumbly with this easy to make treat!

Recipe source:
http://www.dutchgoldhoney.com/store/Recipes/4x6%20Recipe%20Cards/honeydoodles.pdf