Imagine velvety, creamy custard with a delicious caramel note, pepped up with brisk, delightfully tart cranberries. A spoonful of this joy will brighten your day instantly! Serve as a satisfying ending to your autumnal or holiday dinner.
Tips for making the Keto Cranberry Custard
Traditional custard recipes are often complicated, and they might also be tricky to prepare — but not this one! You will be very pleasantly surprised how quick and easy this recipe is. Plus, there are not too many ingredients you need.
This dessert is only moderately sweet. If you prefer a sweeter taste, check out the tips for the variations at the end of this post.
But, without further ado, let’s take a look at how to prepare this rich and velvety custard:
Crush fresh cranberries with a fork so…
…that you’ll end up with 1/2 cup (120 ml) crushed cranberries. You can also use frozen and thawed cranberries, but fresh ones taste better, in my opinion. It’s cranberry season anyway!
Add vanilla stevia to the crushed cranberries. Mix well.
Take 6 ramekins or other small oven-proof dishes (here, I have coffee cups since my ramekins were in the dishwasher after my custard experiments!). Place them into a roasting pan or another large oven-proof pan. Divide the crushed cranberries into the ramekins.
Set aside.
Take a medium bowl and add the eggs…
…Sukrin Gold…
…and the cream.
Whisk until well combined.
Divide the egg and cream mixture into the ramekins, on top of the crushed cranberries. Don’t worry if all cranberries don’t stay at the bottom of the ramekins, but some of them start floating in the cream.
Here we go.
Place the pan with ramekins into the preheated oven. Pour boiling water into the pan so that the water is halfway up the sides of the ramekins.
Bake for 45 minutes or until almost completely set. The center of the custards should be a bit wobbly, but the edges firm.
Remove from the oven and remove the ramekins carefully from the pan. And I mean carefully. You really don’t want to burn yourself with the hot water in the pan! Let cool slightly.
Serve warm. You can also cool the custard until room temperature and refrigerate it. The custard will get stiffer when cold — but it still tastes great!
My Keto Cranberry Custard experiments
About seven years ago, I was doing plenty of keto custard experiments. Actually, I was doing lots of custard and pudding experiments already before that. One of my first ever published recipes on this blog was this Quick Mocha Pudding recipe. In the fall the same year, I posted this Easy Low-Carb Pumpkin Custard recipe and at the same time this Lingonberry Custard recipe on my Finnish blog.
Since then, I’ve done lots of variations on low-carb and keto custards. For some time, I had planned to use cranberries — maybe with brown sugar substitute — to see what kind of fall-time custard that would make. I had no doubt it would be delicious! Moreover, since lingonberries are a purely Nordic thing, cranberries are more global and used especially in the US, where most of my readers are located.
I decided to take my old lingonberry custard recipe and use it as a base for the cranberry version. The original recipe calls for erythritol crystals as sweetener, but for the cranberry version, I decided to use my favorite brown sugar substitute Sukrin Gold. The cranberries just cry for something caramelish — and brown sugar substitute would lend a perfect caramelish note, I thought.
To my first experiment, I crushed some fresh cranberries with a fork to get a 1/2 cup (120 ml) of crushed cranberries. I just thought it sounded like a good amount. I was planning to make 6 to 8 servings of custard and expected 1 tablespoon crushed cranberries would give enough tartness and fruitiness to each serving.
For a moment, I was pondering how to sweeten the cranberries. Well, I could also use Sukrin Gold to sweeten them, but after some thinking decided to sweeten the cranberries with vanilla stevia, just like my lingonberry version. Having a bit of vanilla there wouldn’t hurt, I concluded, since cranberry goes extremely well with vanilla, too.
I took 6 ramekins and divided the cranberry mixture into them. Next, I made the custard mixture in a similar way I made it for the lingonberry custard — just calculated the ingredients according to the US units. The Finnish recipe naturally uses metric units, but here on this blog, I always use both US units and metric units to make it more useful for people all over the world.
Well, I still had to contemplate the amount of Sukrin Gold. The original recipe uses 5 tablespoons erythritol (obviously a well-thought amount…), so I decided to take 1/3 cup (80 ml) Sukrin Gold that goes quite close to 5 tablespoons. Sukrin Gold is a bit sweeter than regular erythritol, but on the other hand, cranberries are tarter than lingonberries, so I was pretty sure the 1/3 cup (80 ml) Sukrin Gold would be just the right amount. I didn’t want to make the dessert overtly sweet either, as there is no point in getting used to really sweet flavors — just the opposite: it’s better to get rid of the sweet tooth. A moderately sweet treat (sweetened with natural sweeteners, that is) once in a while is okay for most people, in my opinion.
After baking the custard, I was delighted with the result. As I said, this custard is not sweet, but there is just enough sweetness to balance out the tartness of the cranberries. It’s really creamy and rich – and those cranberries really make it over the top!
Here’s the recipe for you to enjoy:
- 1/2 cup = 120 ml crushed cranberries
- 20 drops vanilla stevia
- 4 eggs
- 1/3 cup = 80 ml Sukrin Gold
- 1 2/3 cups = 400 ml heavy cream
- Preheat the oven to 300 °F (150 °C).
- Combine the cranberries with the vanilla stevia in a small cup. Mix until well combined.
- Divide the cranberry mixture into 6 ramekins or other small oven-proof dishes. Place the ramekins into a roasting pan or other large oven-proof dish. Set aside.
- Combine the eggs, Sukrin Gold and the heavy cream in a large bowl. Whisk until well combined.
- Pour carefully the egg and cream mixture into the ramekins on the cranberry mixture.
- Place the pan with ramekins in the oven. Pour boiling water into the pan so that the water is halfway up the sides of the ramekins.
- Bake for about 45 minutes, until the custards are almost firm. The center should be slightly wobbly but the edges firm.
- Remove from the oven. Remove the ramekins carefully from the pan and place them on a cooling rack.
- Serve warm.
| Nutrition information | In total | Per serving if 6 servings in total |
| Protein | 39.2 g | 6.5 g |
| Fat | 163.7 g | 27.3 g |
| Net carbs | 17.6 g | 2.9 g |
| kcal | 1695 kcal | 282 kcal |
Tips for variation
If you want a completely smooth custard, puree the cranberries in a blender until very smooth, or use ready 100% cranberry puree if you can find.
As I said, this is not a very sweet dessert — it has just a little bit of sweetness to balance out the tartness of the cranberries. If you are anyway after a sweeter flavor, you can use 1/2 cup (120 ml) Sukrin Gold. An even better option is to use that 1/3 cup (80 ml) Sukrin Gold for making the custard and serve the custard with a generous amount of Sukrin Gold Syrup or other sugar-free syrup (like maple-flavored sugar-free syrup).
To add more warmth and holiday feeling, sprinkle some Ceylon cinnamon on top of the custard right before serving.
My husband loves to eat this custard with hot chocolate sauce. Check out this recipe for a quick and easy version!
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