Woe was I, then, when a blizzard hit after I'd been traveling for a week, and I found myself stuck in my apartment with a nearly bare pantry: no meat in the freezer, no fruits or vegetables in the bin, half a box of dried pasta in the cabinet. What I did have, though, was two sticks of butter, just barely enough flour, a 10-pound bag of sugar left over from a large-scale summer iced tea experiment, and a box of fancy bittersweet chocolate chips.

It wasn't until the oven was preheated and I'd already cracked the eggs that I remembered that my go-to chocolate-chip cookie recipe calls for brown sugar, which I very much did not have. I also didn't have molasses, which the internet helpfully suggested I add to white sugar as a substitution — but I did have a jar of deep, spicy sourwood honey, which in my blizzard-blinded state I figured could kind of, if you squint, pass for molasses. So in it went: all the cookie ingredients, a full cup and a half of plain white sugar instead of the usual ¾ cup, plus three tablespoons of honey. Not surprisingly, the dough was paler and a smidge stickier than it is when I make this recipe using brown sugar, but the cookies baked up without a hitch, the honey caramelizing into bright, floral notes that were a sunny counterpoint to the bittersweet chocolate — perfect dunked in milk, curled up on the couch under a blanket, with the wind and snow roaring outside.

See the recipe for Honey Chocolate-Chip Cookies »