Honey Whipped Cream

The best whipped cream, period. Honey whipped cream is much more flavorful than your standard whipped cream, with strong burnt sugar and vanilla flavors. It’s especially good with fruit! And shortcake.

Honey Whipped Cream with Fresh Fruit

I started making this whipped cream because occasionally, believe it or not, we actually get our hands on good peaches! (Here’s what I do with them when I’m not so fortunate.) And we love to eat them with shortcake.

Many shortcake recipes call for sweet syrup over the peaches in order to make them a bit sweeter. This makes sense. Peaches (or strawberries, or whatever delicious summer fruit you’re using) need a tad more sugar to make the flavors pop against the shortcake, which isn’t usually very sweet. But covering up delicious fruit with sugar syrup makes me sad – I want those delicious flavors to shine just as they are!

So my approach was to make a sweeter whipped cream to eat with the fruit and shortcake. I happened to experiment with honey one evening. As it turns out, a slightly sweeter and more flavorful whipped cream works perfectly to push the fruit toward that bit of sweetness it needs to make the flavors work well together.

The first time I made honey whipped cream, I nearly didn’t make it to the shortcake because the whipped cream was so darn good. I couldn’t stop eating it! I was making dessert for myself and my husband after we’d put the kids down to bed, and I let myself try a bit of whipped cream off of the whisk after I finished whisking the cream. And oh my goodness.

I couldn’t stop. I heard footsteps approaching the kitchen and hid in the corner of the room, poised to begin nonchalantly walking toward the sink with my whisk in hand if my husband or an out-of-bed child came all the way into the kitchen. It’ look like I was just walking over to the sink to rinse off the whisk, business as usual. Because I definitely wasn’t just licking at it like a sewer rat a minute ago, no.

So honey whipped cream was born, and I’m not sure I’m ever going back to the old stuff.

Is Honey Whipped Cream Healthy?

I mean, no. Of course not, it’s whipped cream. It’s dessert. You should eat it in smallish quantities (which is hard, so I suggest not making more than a cup at a time).

But is it healthier than whipped cream made with cane sugar? Marginally, yes. More delicious? Definitely yes. Honey is less processed than refined sugar and contains trace amounts of antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals—nothing to hang your diet on, but enough to justify a tiny nutritional edge. It’s also sweeter than sugar, so you can use less and still get a satisfyingly sweet result.

Also, the cream itself has some nutritional benefits. Real whipped cream contains fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, E, and K. The fat helps you absorb those vitamins, and . . . it’s satiating, meaning you might actually stop eating when you’re full. The fat helps with that, anyway.

Mostly, though, you eat this because it’s delicious. Light, fluffy, creamy – with burnt caramel notes from the honey and bourbon vanilla. It is a whole new level of addictively delicious. And you can eat it with fruit – which is definitely delicious.

So now I have warned you. Maybe plan on making this one when you don’t have anyone home to judge you if they happen to walk in on you hunched over a mixing bowl in the kitchen corner, hiding like a feral raccoon and licking your fingers clean.

And on to the recipe.

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