This recipe is gluten free, but does have dairy, so not suitable for everybody. These variations are low carb / keto but they can be made higher carb.
So, the other day I spotted a recipe for cream cheese cookies with chocolate chips, which sounded pretty darn good to me. However, they were made with sugar and I think some flour, and other things I can’t eat. My sister and niece are low carb / keto at the moment, so I wanted to find a keto cream cheese cookie that I could add sugar free choc chips too, maybe some orange extract and spices, to make a low carb Christmas cookie.
I found some made with coconut flour, some with coconut and almond, and this one made with just almond flour. I tweaked the sweetener, added orange essence, and added spices to one half and sugar free choc chips to the other. My process was also slightly different.
My ingredients
60gm / 2 oz butter, softened
60gm / 2 oz cream cheese, softened
1 small egg
1 sachet of KAL stevia plus monk fruit (see notes)
3 cups ground almonds / almond flour
2 tsp orange extract
1/2 teaspoon Frontier dehydrated lemon rind (or better still, grate some off a fresh lemon)
1 teaspoon cinnamon (or mixed spice would work)
About 36 large sugar free choc chips (smaller ones would be better)
What I did
The original recipe said to beat the butter and cream cheese together, till creamed. I don’t have a mixer, so I put the butter and cream cheese into my food processor and zizzed it up a bit. It did need scraping down a couple of times, but worked fine to cream them together. I then added the egg and gave it a quick zizz. Next went in the sweetener, the orange extract and the first ½ cup of ground almonds. When that was all mixed nicely together, I added the rest of the ground almonds ½ a cup at a time, mixing well before the next lot. You’ll probably think it won’t all be absorbed, but trust me, it will. By the end, it was forming a nice clump. (At this point, I was happily experimenting and not thinking about photos for a Steemit post. Sorry!)
I then got two bowls and put half the mixture in each. To one bowl, I added the lemon rind and spices and mixed it all in. To the other, I added the chocolate chips. I rolled each into a log, wrapped them in baking paper and popped them in the fridge. By this time it was 9pm, we hadn’t eaten dinner (though it was cooking) and I called it quits till the morning.
By then I was thinking, and took a photo of the two mixtures, nicely wrapped up like two enormous joints.
I turned the oven on to 175C / 350F. The next step was to cut each log into 12 pieces, by cutting in half, then into quarters, then each piece into 3. Partway through somebody came to the door, and by the time I came back, the chocolate mix had gone a bit soft, so you can see my cutting didn’t work too well. (Learn from my mistake! It needs to go back in the fridge if that happens.) The other problem was that the chocolate chips were really too big. I’d cut them in half or even quarters another time.
You can see that the spice mix has made nice circles and a well shaped cookie, though if I’d flattened the end of the roll before putting in the fridge it would have been better.
But the choc ones needed a bit of reshaping, so they’re a bit random.
Into the oven for 15 minutes each. The spice came out bang on time, but then I was interrupted with a phone call, so the choc ones had a couple of minutes longer than I would have liked.
The verdict
Taste tested by myself, @sift666 and my 19 year old nephew who eats a pretty standard NZ diet. I though the spice ones were a bit bland, being neither spicy enough nor sweet enough. But they were a nice smooth texture, almost shortbread like, and the other two liked them a lot.
@sift666 and I both liked the chocolate chip ones a tiny bit better. My nephew preferred the spicy ones, but thought the rest of his family would prefer the choc chips.
Notes and Variations
Most people would prefer them a bit sweeter, I think, but with stevia it’s always best to go cautious the first time. The original recipe called for ¾ cup erythritol, for example. If you don’t need to be low carb, you could try maple or coconut syrup. Then just add a little more almonds if needed. Even ordinary sugar or brown sugar would work, if you are gluten free but not sugar free.
Two teaspoons of natural orange essence gave it a nice subtle orange flavour, but you could probably add a tiny bit more for a more intense flavour.
If you have it sweeter, you could probably ramp up the spices a little more, if you like a very spicy Xmas cookie.
If you don’t need to be low carb, rather than too much sweetener, I’d probably add some dried fruit as well as spice and call it a Christmas Cake cookie.
And if you really want to go for gold, how about spices, dried fruit AND some chocolate chips!
Getting shapely on it
If you wanted holiday shapes, form it into a square before refrigerating (like in my Christmas Cheesy Stars recipe) then roll out and use a cookie cutter.
Toppings
I didn’t put any icing (which is what we call frosting) on these, but you could try all sorts of things:
Some melted sugar free choc
A cream cheese and low carb sweetener spread
If not going low carb, cream cheese and honey blended together
Or some Royal icing, almond paste or marzipan
Ok, so there you have it. As usual, I’ve given you less of a recipe and more of a template to create your own masterpiece.
That’s my only new recipe this Christmas, but tomorrow, all going well, I’ll recap all the recipes I shared with you last Christmas.
Thanks for reading
Photos by myself or @sift666
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