Light Muscovado Unrefined Cane Sugar product reviews

Billington's Light Muscovado Sugar is what my grandmother called, proper sugar. It has a good taste, the granules are nice and defined and in my books it is a good quality product. To add to that, the box with the illuminated letter is pretty and the little window it a neat idea.

I decided to get testing on this sugar by using it as an everyday sugar. I put it on my porridge and it melted nicely giving a good fudge flavour. I found I didn't need as much as I would put on with demerara sugar because the melting spread it nicely. It turned a boring old weekday breakfast into a much tastier experience.

Another breakfast I used it for was oat pancakes with stewed apples. It was put into the pancake batter and mixed in nicely. With the stewed apples I sprinkled it over the fruit in the pan and added some water. The apples stewed nicely and the sugar dissolved and didn't catch on the bottom of the pan at all. It gave a good flavour and worked well with the fruit. It stopped that sticky syrup taste white sugar often produces and left a good light caramel sauce.

I will carry on using this sugar in place of white sugar and probably reduce the amounts stated in a recipe as the flavour is easy to detect. As with the other Billington's sugars, this will have a long term place in my cupboard.

I love the Billingtons Light Musovado Cane Sugar, in comparison to their other muscovado this one has a lovely smell to it. I love the little boxes that the come in, making them easy to store, read and see what you are using/buying. I also think the pricing is great.

We used the light muscovado to make chocolate chip cookies with miss six. We used the same recipe we always use, just substituting the sugar we would normally use for the light muscovado. The boxes are great for little hands, meaning miss six was able to measure out the sugar herself, without needing us to do it for her like normal...she loved that as she felt so independent :)

It mixed into the mixture very well, and the mix was also easy to handle and a lovely colour too. The end reason was beautiful cookies, with a gorgeous colour and a truly wonderful flavour. As I said we used a tried and true recipe that we always use, but using the different sugar made a much nicer cookie. I was pleasantly surprised at how much it changed the flavour and how delicious they were.

We have since used the light muscovado in a self saucing chocolate pudding and a banana cake, both using recipes we always use, and like the cookies the end results have been better than the originals. Billingtons Light Muscovado is now my preferred brown sugar for use in all my baking! I absolutely love it!

I used this mainly as a replacement for brown sugar. First test was just mixing some through plain, boring old porridge. I found that it tasted a lot like brown sugar but with more of a caramel taste to it than brown sugar, which the kids love and they eat the porridge a little too quickly at times.

I felt like making some coffee cake the other day, and figured that I would give it a try and add some of the Light Muscovado to my cake and just minus some of the white sugar, making it half and half. I found that it made it a lot richer and a lit nicer in taste, even though the cake fell flat (literally) it still had a great taste.

Fudge is now a staple sweet in our house as it is so incredibly easy to make and it makes quite a decent amount as well. Typically I use brown sugar, so thought that I would again go half/half with the sugars and add some of the Light Muscovado into the mix. This added flavour to the mix and as a result I only needed half the essence that I usually needed.

All in all a lovely sugar, not sure if I would buy it again, but I think I may for birthday party foods.

First of all the packaging is great a small box with a little window gives the colouring of the sugar, its a nice light colour. Opening the box to fine a bag sealed, opening the bag I found a nice smell like brown sugar, and I love that smell.

My recipe I used was a Gluten Free one from GFME who do yummy gluten free stuff, this worked really well with the flours and put a nice taste into the crunch slice I made using almonds. The feel of the sugar when working with it is soft and just falls apart in your hands, it doesnt stick to your fingers.

I used this on my porridge too I didn't fine it sickly rich, just a nice texture and it melted nice onto my porridge, didn't need a lot of it to get a nice flavour. Never heard of this sugar before but I'm loving it for my baking and breakfast. The price isnt too bad either considering the amount things you can do with it

There seem to be three main 'food philosophies' at work in NZ. You have your 'Indian Ayurveda' (*1) where food is crafted to create certain physiological shifts in the body's metabolism, with the goal of improving health... 'Asian Cuisine' where the food carries flavours from all five of the major 'tastes' (Sweet, sour, salty, savoury/umame, and bitter) in various proportions to give the overall taste... and 'Western Complementary' where tastes are combined based on common flavour elements that overlap, forming a 'bridge' between them.

I often find that with Asian-style foods, the 'sweet' aspect is a little underutilised for my tastes, so I usually add a little sugar to any Asian-style food I prepare to balance off the sour/bitter components a bit more. In this case, I used the Light Muscovado to offset some off the 'salty' from the soy and oyster sauce in a Chicken Chow Mein I prepared. Normally, I would use honey because of the lack of processing, but I liked the results of using the unrefined sugar instead, as it was easier to get a more accurate and objective measure.

The results... well, the photo gives you a good idea of how scrumptious it looked, and I will state for the record that the taste was amazing! With the hints of ginger creeping through, and the now-reduced salty tang from the oyster and dark soy sauces hinting away quietly in the background, it was a wonderfully delicate flavour.

I also used the Light Muscovado as part of some baking - making an apple cake which, surprisingly for this house, didn't even last 3 days. Normally, any dessert-type baking takes 4-5 days to be consumed... but Mr4 loved it so much he demanded a piece in his lunchbox before he would willingly go to Daycare, and Mr12 thought a slice was really nice just as an afternoon snack to tide him over until dinner time. I can only say it must have been the Muscovado, because the previous Apple Cake, using the same recipe except for the use of refined white sugar, ended up having bits thrown out because they went mouldy waiting to be eaten.

Overall, this is a wonderful sugar that I will certainly be keeping a stock of in the pantry. So versatile, it apparently went well on morning porridge too... but I can't vouch for that, since my breakfast is usually a little more towards the eggs-on-toast or savoury-mince end of the dining spectrum.

*1 : http://sandeepgupta.com/pages/Ayurveda.html

I love the richness of dark sugars and have never used Billington's before so was very keen to try out the range on offer. I started with the Light Muscovado Sugar simply because it was a rainy afternoon and I had the ingredients to make chocolate chip biscuits, and Anzac biscuits so thought I would use the light muscovado as a substitute for the sugar I would normally use.

A very good call if I must say so myself! The sugar comes in a very appealing box which has strip through which you can see the colour of the sugar, and I assume keep an eye on the level, so you can replenish when the level gets low! This sugar is unrefined and just by tasting off a teaspoon you can taste the quality of this.

I made my chocolate chip cookies with this and they were absolutely divine. The depth of colour from the sugar meant that I probably pulled them out of the oven a tad early thinking I was overcooking them but they were so chewy and more'ish which I preferred to the normally crispier version I make. Everyone in the family loved the taste so I would definitely use this sugar when I next make them. I then used the sugar in my Anzac biscuits. Once again my biscuits ended up a bit moist because I thought I was overcooking them from the colour but they were also eaten pretty quick and the uncooked mixture was pretty irresistible!

This is definitely a very usable sugar and one that I would happily buy and use in my baking. I love the quality of this and the richness that definitely surpasses the brown sugar I normally use. I would recommend this as a must have in the pantry and will definitely have it in stock in mine.

When I first got the three boxes of the Billington's Sugars, I was pretty sure that the light muscovado was going to be my sugar of choice. It's the closet in colour to brown sugar and I knew I could make a go of cookies and things with this sugar. Packaging wise, I liked the square box and having somewhere to store the sugar in. The bag itself didn't tear open easily and made for messy usage.

When I opened the packet, the smell of the sugar was sweet but seemed far more complex than our average brown sugar. The first thing I did was a chocolate chip cookie recipe. I replaced the brown sugar in the recipe as well as the white sugar portion with this light muscovado. The cookie dough came out with a lovely rich colour. The smell was amazing and the taste of the cookie dough was delicious but not quite moreish. It was as if you didn't need a lot to satisfy the sweet tooth.

Those cookies came out really good, they had a good crunch to them, and kinda felt like a lacey texture from the sugar. I sent them to school for a shared lunch. Not one of them came home. I also made a batch of jelly bean cookies using this sugar and some mini baking beans. Those cookies came out a bit more chewy, like an American style cookie. I also used this in a fruit crumble topping and even put it on my daughter's weetbix one morning. This sugar was easily the most acceptable to the family for general use.

I had never heard of Muscovado sugar before the call came out for reviewers for these so had to do some quick google searching to find out what I would use them for. I found some great recipes and there were good reviews on how the Muscavodo gives another element to the taste of baking so I was really keen to try it for myself.

Out of the three sugars this one is my favourite as it has the lightest of the molasses flavour and really substitutes brown sugar quite nicely as it has a more delicate flavour than the other ones. It has a nice subtle caramelly taste and adds a bit more depth in the flavour when baking. The first thing I made with this was some chocolate mousse and the mousse which I have made before had a very rich deep flavour with the muscovado sugar added.

I also made some caramel and white chocolate fudge. I wanted to use the Light Muscovado for this as, it is a light coloured fudge so wanted to use the light sugar so it didn't make the fudge too dark. The fudge is really sweet and has a gorgeous caramel flavour, as it is so rich you can only have a small square at a time but I think the Muscovado definitely complented the flavours in this recipe and added to the caramel taste. The only problem I had was that is because this is such a moist sugar even after sieving the sugar some bits clumped together and were quite hard to stir into the mixture but I think I managed to get most of the lumps out in the end.

After trying Billington's Light Muscovado Sugar I am sold on it. It has the light brown colour I would expect from brown sugar but the taste is worth the extra cost. It is smooth creamy flavour and is definitely not as strong as the dark muscovado.

After searching for recipes online I found two ingredients seemed to be paired with this sugar, ginger and chocolate. I chose three recipes, gingerbread men which also included Billington's Molasses, ginger beer and brown sugar brownies. All three were a great success and converted me to this great product.

The ginger beer was made with all natural ingredients: root ginger; lemons, muscovado sugar and soda water. The sugar dissolved easily into the soda water and the flavour was distributed evenly throughout. As the only sweetener in the ginger beer helped to balance out the tartness of the lemon. A drink that I will be making again.

The brown sugar brownie was enjoyed by all the family but when I suggested to my husband he take some in his lunch tomorrow he told me that he wouldn't be able to hold off eating it that long. This also had melted chocolate in it but it wasn't two sweet but was very rich like a fudge.

This is a product I will be recommending to friends and buying again. Thanks Billington's and KIWIreviews for introducing me to this great product.