News Taffy

Happy New Year! I'm a bit late, but that seems to come with the season of motherhood, particularly if that season of motherhood is also falling in the season of cold, flu, and stomach virus season.

Your house too? The stomach virus was the most recent dreaded illness to drift through the halls of my home, and I was more than ready to see it out the door. We've been very lucky to avoid the flu so far, and I am jamming my children full of fruits, veggies, and Vitamin C in hopes that God will bless that good work and keep it at bay!

The cough, however, has snuck in. Not full force, but here and there, someone, usually my youngest, will have a cough. Her's is mostly tied to allergies and often will require an inhaler to help if it gets bad, but sometimes if it's mild a little honey will do the trick. Honey is a beautiful thing given by nature. It was one of the best things to soothe a cough, particularly if the one coughing is at a young age. It is now recommended that cough medicines not be given to children as young as my two year old, and should never be given to a child with a productive cough. At the same time, you should not give honey to a child under one year old. If you do, you run the risk of feeding your little one honey contaminated with botulism spores. Adults and older children can handle small amounts of botulism, but a child under one should wait until their intestines have had time to mature and develop a balance of natural acids that can help fight for them.

With that being said, when someone in your home has a cough, honey may be the easiest, best first step in soothing the cough. An even easier way? Honey suckers or cough drops. Did you know you could boil straight honey to concentrate the natural sugars and cause it to harden like candy? Pinterest can teach you anything.

You'll need: 1/2 cup to 1 cup of honey, a nonstick surface or sucker mold with sticks to make them candy and a thermometer. First, pour your honey into a small sauce pan and boil over low heat until your honey reaches 300 degrees F. You can test your honey to see if it's ready by using the cold water test when making candy. Have a cup of cold water and drizzle a little of the honey into the water. If the honey hardens immediately, it's ready. When it's ready, remove it from the burner. At this point, you may add 1/2 tsp of flavor if you like such as cinnamon extract. Stir it once more and then pour the honey into the sucker mold with sticks already in place, or drop a teaspoonfull of honey onto drops on a nonstick surface. Once they're hard, you can remove them from the mold or surface and store them in a ziplock bag. Now, you have 100 percent honey homemade cough drops or suckers!

Hope this helps you make it through the rest of our cold season!

Until next time,
Heather