Sugar Free Easter Treats - Coconut Fudge

Last night was a late night for me, I was up until all hours making a few Easter treats for the children – I  ended up with some Coconut Balls (raw figs, dates, nuts, almond butter), Fig Newtons, Cashew & Date Bars and Coconut Fudge.

The one thing I have mentioned to people time and again about the way we eat, is how we are never deprived. How I don’t miss sugar or any other addictive substance because we eat so much better and are quite satisfied with our food.

There is a way around everything and a way to have your cake (or cookies or dessert) without  adding or using anything nasty in the recipe. This is just good wholesome food the way it was intended to be – homemade of course.

So – for a treat at any time of the year and something that I would consider to be far superior in taste – try some Coconut Fudge. It can be made with any number of things, we like to use fresh organic orange zest, but I also like lime and lemon too or sometimes a few berries.

The taste of coconut and orange is refreshing without the guilt or after taste (I never like the way my body felt even an hour after eating sugar)  of eating sugar. This fudge also nice crumbled over a cake or some other dessert as a topping.

Coconut Fudge

1 package creamed coconut

3 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons grated orange zest

To make coconut fudge is easy! All you need to do is melt the creamed coconut in a small saucepan over a low heat. As it melts, add in the honey and keep stirring gently to ensure it is all melted.

Once there is only liquid in the saucepan turn off the heat and stir in the orange zest. You may also use lime or lemon if desired. For a little extra citrus taste add 1 tablespoon orange juice.

Pour out this coconut cream into a shallow dish (I cover the bottom in parchment paper) and place in the fridge to cool until it is set. As it cools it will harden – you can then cut it into pieces – just like any other fudge.

This tastes great and the best part – it’s sugar free!

April

Cooled down and ready to cut - Coconut Fudge

Liquid Gold - Bees & Honey

Since today is a food day, I have been cooking and eating all day! Which is not how things usually are however,  I have been working on some more recipes and we had some tasting to do. Besides, what else would there be to do on a rainy Thursday at home?

Well, one other thing I have been doing is filtering honey through a muslin cloth into jars for storage. We just moved a hive to higher ground and in the shift had to remove quite a bit of old comb (they had lots) and ended up with some lovely honey.

Of course this is a messy job and everyone in the house wants to be in on it - so everyone and everything gets sticky! The one thing I have noticed myself doing (again) is comparing my honey from my own bees to something that would come in a jar from Tesco's for instance.

Of course, my first thought is that Tesco honey looks 'like honey' - which is what we as consumers have been trained to expect from a honey product. These thoughts brought me back to the years spent working on my honey project at CAFRE college in Northern Ireland and the things I found out about myself and others as a consumer (or a well trained monkey!)

Well, first of all, the honey we have in our hives is different from something found in a shop. We do not feed our bees and do not treat with anything. We also keep a large herb garden. But more then that, we use the comb honey, untreated, unheated - as is.

Unless I want some filtered for baking and cooking - which is what I am doing today, we eat the honey straight from the hives. I wouldn't' for the life of me want to alter anything this precious. 

However I know enough about this subject and how honey is processed before it arrives on a store shelf to understand that our perceptions of honey are shaped by what is available to us from a shop. When I was working on my study at CAFRE college, during some of the food labs, I surveyed people extensively about their tastes, preferences and expectations for honey.

What was uncovered was that none of their preferences were based in reality - people wanted medium coloured, light tasting, clear honey - the type that would indicate it was blended from multiple sources, heated to high temperatures and imported in from God knows where. 

Yet, they expected this commercially produced honey to be very good for them and have medicinal properties. 

Very few people would have known to use local honey, on the comb when you can get it, unheated, untreated - right out of the hive is best, especially if you want it for medicinal purposes. And that local honey colours and tastes vary from season to season as well as within each hive. 

Bees which have access to herbs such as thyme, sage, lavender and chamomile would produce a great tasting honey as well as perhaps be quite healthy and strong themselves. Each of these factors is important for us to know as informed consumers (taking the game to another level). 

If you like honey and have a back garden, you should consider keeping bees, you don't have much to do with them, just plant a few herbs or flowers and let them do their thing. 

They are an indicator species for the planet - if they fail to thrive, so do we. That seems pretty important to me.

Well, off to keep going with the honey!

Have a healthy day,

April

Top Bar hive in back garden

What’s Wrong with the Bees?

I have pondered this one for awhile and have gone back and forth trying to understand just why honey did not feel right. It is not an animal product per se, as it is produced by bees and does not come from their bodies such as milk would from a cow. 

We can safely remove some honey from bees and not kill or harm them, and honey has many beneficial healing properties. It was only after I became a beekeeper myself and got involved in the industry that I discovered the problem with commercial honey and perhaps the problem with the bees. 

Commercial honey producers supplement (there is that word again) their honey bees with white sugar made into a thick syrup. In a wet rainy summer like we have had for the past fews years in Ireland, the bees may be supplemented with this ‘food’ several times. 

This does a couple of things, it allows them to continue producing honey no matter what the weather, and it must also make them sick. As these are the bees that farmers are losing.

A commercial hive is bigger then a traditional one, housing more bees, feeding them is a common and expected practice, and then producers harvest all of the honey produced only to leave the bees with more sugar water for the winter and none of their own real food. 

This is a recipe for disaster- I finally knew what was wrong with the honey I bought in the shops, it was made from sugar, and not entirely from the pollen of various plants. Therefore with the energy and vibration of sugar, it aided in the depletion of the immune function (for the bees) and no longer acted in a therapeutic manner (for the humans). 

So we crossed commercial honey off our lists and now hopefully we will eventually produce our own from gently handled bees who are not fed anything other then what they can forage and they live in small eco friendly hives. 

I keep a herb and bee garden as well with many herbs and flowers that they like and hope to expand it from year to year. I would urge everyone to get some bees, and get going with bringing back this wonderful creature into its natural state - treat them right and nature will reward you. 

Have a healthy day,

April

The boys with the bees in the back garden