5-Ingredient Keto Snickerdoodles

Meet one of the all-time favorite cookie recipes, snickerdoodles, ketoized. The lovely flavor of cinnamon, all the sweetness without any added sugar, and a slightly tart bite of baking soda will combine into a delicious keto holiday cookie. Scrumptious, but so much better for you than the traditional wheaty and sugary version. Just take a bite and feel the goodness! Not keen on using fiber syrup? No worries: I’ll provide a fiber syrup free variation in the tips for variations section.

Tips for making the 5-Ingredient Keto Snickerdoodles

This is an easy and fun recipe to make even with kids. All you need is to mix two ingredients together into a firm dough, shape into cookies and coat them with the mixture of cinnamon “sugar” (which naturally doesn’t contain any real sugar or carbs whatsoever!).

But let’s take a look at how to prepare these easy-to-make keto cookies:

Place the almond butter into a small bowl. Be sure to use almond butter made from blanched almonds for the best result. I always make my own almond butter with a high-speed blender. That guarantees not only the freshest result but also the best taste. And it is so much more affordable than store-bought almond butter!

Moreover, as almonds contain mostly polyunsaturated fats, they will easily go rancid when processed and stored long — like in the commercial products. Therefore making your own almond butter really pays off. I often add some extra-light olive oil to make the blender run better.

Add the fiber syrup…

…and the baking soda.

Knead…

…until smooth and stiff, about 2 minutes.

Divide the dough into walnut-sized balls — or your preferred size. Basically, the dough makes 8-16 cookies.

Place the balls onto a parchment paper-lined baking sheet.

Flatten the balls with your fingertips. Set the baking sheet aside for a while.

Place the erythritol crystals into a small, shallow bowl.

Add the Ceylon cinnamon.

Stir until well combined.

Coat the cookies well on both sides with the cinnamon mixture.

Place back onto the baking sheet.

Bake in a preheated oven…

…until they’ve got some color — but not too much! Don’t let them get too brown. When the center starts rising, you’ll know that the cookies are ready. Usually, 8-12 minutes is enough. In my oven, 10 minutes is just perfect.

Let cool completely before removing from the baking sheet. This is important, as the cookies are very fragile when they are hot. However, they hold well together once cooled. On the other hand, if you like your cookies chewy, feel free to enjoy them slightly warm. Super-scrumptious!

Yum!

My 5-Ingredient Keto Snickerdoodle experiments

For a very long time, I’ve wanted to develop a keto snickerdoodle recipe. People rave about snickerdoodles, however, here in Finland snickerdoodles are unknown. I think they are a very American concept, anyway.

So, I read lots of descriptions of traditional snickerdoodles and searched for the best recipes. To sum up, the best snickerdoodles proved to be chewy rather than crunchy — though this might be just a matter of preference — and they had a characteristic flavor of cream of tartar or baking soda that were used as leavening agents.

I remembered my 2-Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookie recipe and thought I can use the same recipe as the base for my keto snickerdoodle recipe, but replace the peanut butter with almond butter made from blanched almonds and the brown Sukrin syrup with clear Sukrin syrup. Then, I just needed to add cream of tartar for that tart flavor (I doubted cream of tartar would help these keto cookies rise, so I mainly used it because of taste). I also needed a mixture of erythritol crystals and cinnamon for coating the cookies before baking.

I prepared the first test batch, using the same measures for the dough than in my 2-ingredient PB cookie recipe, plus I added 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar. 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar just felt like the right amount. After kneading the dough for some 2 minutes, the result was stiff and sturdy, and the dough was easy to form into cookies.

For the “sugar” and cinnamon coating, I mixed 1/4 cup (60 ml) erythritol crystals with 1 tablespoon Ceylon cinnamon. I coated the cookies well with the mixture, placed back onto the baking sheet, and baked for 10 minutes.

From my previous experiments, I knew the hot cookies were fragile, so I just let them cool down before excitedly tasting one. The taste was nicely cinnamony and sweet — very pleasing to my palate!

Well, but I still wanted to try out different variations and fine-tune the recipe. First of all, I made some macadamia nut butter to reduce the carb count even more, since macadamias are lower in carbs than almonds.

When preparing the macadamia butter, I made a terrible mistake: I added extra-light olive oil, just like always add to my nut and almond butters. But the thing is, that macadamias are so high in fat that you really don’t need any additional fat when you make macadamia butter! So, my macadamia butter ended up being too runny. I made another batch without additional oil, and it turned out much better. Lesson learned here.

I tried a little bit different variation on the cookies with (the runny) macadamia butter. This time, I omitted the syrup and used erythritol crystals and an egg. This variation had previously worked well with almond butter made with whole almonds, but when made with my oily and runny macadamia butter, the dough turned out a colossal disaster that was oozing out oil and hardly held together:

The dough was so oily that it was impossible to shape into cookies. I ended up baking the whole mixture in a baking dish. But, the result wasn’t any better: the creation had a painfully hard surface and soggy, oily interior. To the bin it went, unfortunately.

I made still another test batch using the first 2-ingredient method with freshly made almond butter and Sukrin syrup. This time, I replaced the cream of tartar with one full teaspoon of baking soda. I hoped to get that needed sour bite from baking soda instead of cream of tartar. Maybe the cookies will also rise a bit — who knows?

This experiment turned out even better — I would say just perfect. I tasted one, still warm cookie out of the baking sheet. It was fragrant with tempting cinnamon aroma, and the texture was still a bit chewy. Pure pleasure! And since my family also approved the cookies with flying colors, I thought this surprisingly simple recipe is a real winner and worth posting here. I think it tells a lot that the plate with the keto snickerdoodles was suddenly empty on the same day I had baked the cookies. After a while, my husband and son confessed they had munched all of them. I bet you and your family will love them, too. Just keep the indulging in moderation, and don’t gulp down the whole batch at once!

Nutrition information	In total	Per cookie if 12 cookies in total
Protein	54.5 g	4.5 g
Fat	132.7 g	11.1 g
Net carbs	15.9 g	1.3 g
kcal	1620 kcal	135 kcal

 

Tips for variations

Fiber syrups are excellent in keto cooking and baking, however, they might raise the blood sugar levels in some people. In case you are one of those persons, you can prepare these cookies also without syrup. In that case, make the cookie dough using 1 cup (240 ml) almond butter, 1/4 cup (60 ml) erythritol crystals, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and 1 organic free-range egg. Knead the ingredients together into a stiff dough. Make into cookies as directed in the recipe (in the recipe box above). Actually, the before mentioned cookie recipe is pretty similar to this variation, it just doesn’t use baking soda.

Talking about baking soda, you can taste its bite in these cookies. If you are not a fan of that slightly sour yet alkaline flavor, you can replace baking soda with aluminum-free baking powder. Baking powder tastes much milder.

To reduce the carbs even further, you can use macadamia nut butter — if you can find it. Again, you can make your own macadamia nut butter for the best and freshest result. But please don’t repeat my mistake and add any oil in it!

General prattling

Finding herbs from my herb garden is getting more and more difficult. The snow just comes and goes — and you don’t know how the next day is going to look like, beautifully snowy and white, or dull, dark, and gray. Now it seems like we won’t get a white Christmas here in Southern Finland. Nope. It’s just going to rain. And rain some more. This darkness combined with rain is not very cheerful, but hey, at least snow won’t be covering my herb garden so I can access those few tough guys that manage to grow there during the winter. Meet strong mint (not only flavorwise, but survival-wise):

This parsley needed some digging from under the snow:

It ended up in one of my food photos for my upcoming cookbook:

I’m surprised that this oregano is still (mostly) alive:

And white Christmas or not, it’s the feeling that counts. I wish you and your family a Very Merry Christmas!