I have been making my own vegan honee for a couple of years now, and I still love my original honee recipe! It uses chamomile tea bags to give the honee a floral note and make it taste like honey from bees. Last month, though, our yard was covered with dandelions and my mom and I used dandelion flowers to make amazing dandelion honee for Beltane. The dandelion honee has a stronger honey flavor than my original recipe, which is perfect for when you want honee with a bolder flavor.
Now, our yard is covered with clover, so we made clover honee for Litha (Summer Solstice)! Note: I got a number of comments on my dandelion post from people concerned that we were taking the flowers and not leaving them from the bees. Please do not worry about this! We live on 2.5 acres that were covered with dandelions and are now covered with clover. We only gathered a tiny fraction of the flowers and left plenty for the bees!
We picked about 3 cups of clover flowers:
I added a few tablespoons of baking soda to about eight cups of water, and then soaked the clover flowers in the soda water for twenty minutes. We don’t use any chemicals on our lawn, but we live next to farms that do use pesticides. Soaking your produce in soda water is supposed to remove toxins, so I did that just to be sure:
I thoroughly rinsed the clover flowers after soaking them, then spread them out to dry:
I let them dry overnight, then pulled the petals off the stems as shown:
Note that this post only covers the differences between my original recipe and this one. You can find the full instructions for how to make vegan honee by clicking the link.
To make clover honee, bring about three cups of the unsweetened apple juice that you will be using to make the honee to a boil. (Keep the pot covered while you do this.)
Turn off the heat, add the clover petals, stir, then cover the pot. Allow to steep for two hours:
Strain the petals and reserve the juice:
Quite a lot of particulate matter came through the strainer, so I poured the strained juice through a reusable tea bag to remove the rest. A coffee filter would work even better, but I didn’t have any.
Use the flavored juice along with the rest of the apple juice as directed in my original vegan honee recipe. You will add the vegan sugar, but you will not use the chamomile tea bags as the honey is already flavored with the clover.
I made granola with the clover honee, and then made peach parfaits with Silk plain soy yogurt, granola, diced fresh peaches, and more honee. They were so good!
Then, my mom and I did a taste test with my original chamomile honee, our dandelion honee, and our new clover honee:
They all are very good! You will be very happy with any of them, but there are some differences worth noting. The dandelion and clover honees are both a little stronger in honey flavor than the original is, but this could be because I steeped the flower petals for two hours. In my original recipe, I keep the chamomile tea bags in the boiling juice for only thirty minutes. This does save the steeping time, so the honee is quicker to make, but steeping the tea bags for two hours might produce a stronger flavor if that is desired. We also tried mixing the three kinds, and this was definitely our favorite. The combined floral notes of the mixture made for a more complex honee flavor, so I’ll be making a wildflower honee next!