Sugar-Free Marzipan 2.0

It’s time to update my 10-year-old Sugar-Free Marzipan recipe! This new recipe is easier to make and much more versatile. Moreover, it’s considerably better tolerated as it doesn’t contain egg white like the old recipe. This new updated version is vegan, so you can offer your keto marzipan treats to those who don’t eat eggs or dairy or who are vegan. Read on to find the recipe for the ultimate Sugar-Free Marzipan 2.0 and find the numerous ways to use it!

How to make this 4-ingredient Sugar-Free Marzipan 2.0

4 ingredients are all you need to make this health-boosting marzipan. So, which are these ingredients? Naturally, you’ll need almond flour (super-fine if you can find, even almond meal from blanched almonds will do, although it doesn’t produce as a smooth result as super-fine almond flour does).

As regular marzipan uses confectioner’s sugar (i.e., icing sugar), you’ll need a keto-friendly natural sweetener for this keto marzipan. I’ve chosen one of my favorite sweeteners, powdered erythritol, sold under different brands, such as Now Foods, Swerve, and Anthony’s. You can also make powdered erythritol in a blender from erythritol crystals.

My old marzipan recipe uses egg white for binding, but as so many people don’t want to eat raw eggs, I wanted to find a better solution. Well, I came up with an extremely simple replacement for egg white: water! Yes, you can bind the mixture of almond flour and powdered erythritol with water into a smooth and homogenous paste that you can mold as you want!

For flavoring, I’ve chosen traditional bitter almond flavoring, however, you can replace it with rosewater if you cannot find bitter almond flavoring or if you don’t happen to like it. Anyway, rosewater is a traditional flavoring in marzipan, and it’s very natural, too. Find more flavoring suggestions from the Tips for Variations section below.

So, let’s take a look at how to prepare this easy Sugar-Free Marzipan 2.0:

Combine 2 cups (470 ml) super-fine almond flour…

…and 2/3 cup (160 ml) powdered erythritol. This amount gives you moderate sweetness. If you want really sweet marzipan, you can add some stevia powder. You can also increase the amount of powdered erythritol, but I don’t recommend using more than 3/4 cup (180 ml) as powdered erythritol might leave a cooling aftertaste that tickles in the throat. You can certainly add other sweeteners in addition to powdered erythritol. Again, see the Tips for Variations section below.

Mix well with a spoon.

Break the lumps with the back of the spoon. You can also press the mixture through a sieve to guarantee a smooth result, but mixing with a spoon should do the job very well.

Looks good and well combined!

Next, pour in 3 tablespoons water.

Add also 1/2 teaspoon bitter almond flavoring. This amount lends quite a strong taste, so you can add half of the amount if you don’t care that much about strong bitter almond flavor.

Knead with clean hands (I prefer to use gloves)…

…knead…

…until you can form a sturdy ball from the mixture. Proper kneading pays off as it truly improves the texture of the marzipan. Kneading takes a few minutes, and as I said, proper kneading is needed to make excellent Sugar-Free Marzipan.

Next, roll the marzipan into a shape of a log. This log here is about one inch (2.5 cm) in diameter. It can be slightly wider, too. It doesn’t really matter.

Wrap the log into a plastic wrap.

Close the ends tightly. Refrigerate the marzipan until using.

When you are ready to use the marzipan, unwrap it.

Slice into slices and use it, for example, as a filling in sweet rolls (like we Finns do for laskiaispullat)…

…or make confections: place pistachio or a whole almond into the center.

Shape into a shape of cylinder.

Cover with melted extra-dark chocolate.

These beyond-belief delicious confections have some freeze-dried bilberries crushed on top. So totally mouth-watering!

There are many other ways to use your keto marzipan as well. You can roll out the marzipan and cover a cake with it, like this keto Princess Cake. I’ve filled the cake with Sugar-Free Raspberry Jam and the Very Best Sugar-Free Vanilla Frosting.

And like the traditional sugary marzipan, you can use this Sugar-Free Marzipan for shaping the most imaginative shapes!

How I came up with this easy keto marzipan recipe

My ten-year-old marzipan recipe has been my go-to recipe for a long time, well, these ten years! However, the idea to improve this ages-old recipe got wings when I was developing a keto marzipan recipe for our Finnish Ketokamu followers. Namely, we will soon celebrate laskiainen in Finland, so I wanted to create a keto laskiaispulla recipe.

Laskiaispulla is a sweet roll filled with whipped cream and either jam or marzipan. Finns always argue which ones taste best, jam-filled rolls or marzipan-filled rolls. Personally, I like both, well, maybe the marzipan-filled ones are more fascinating and exotic since the Finnish kitchen doesn’t often use marzipan, but jam is certainly standard stuff.

So, as we had launched our Ketokamu Makeuttaja sweetener that consists of powdered erythritol, stevia powder, and natural flavoring, I definitely wanted to know if it works in keto marzipan. I took my old marzipan recipe and swapped erythritol to our Makeuttaja. The result was unbelievably mouth-watering! I actually added less of our sweetener as it’s sweeter than pure erythritol that I used in the old recipe.

I also developed a keto pulla, i.e., sweet roll, recipe from the baking mix I had created for Ketokamu to make laskiaispulla. Together with the marzipan and my keto queen jam recipe, I also posted the pulla recipe to my Finnish keto baking group on Facebook. The group members raved about the recipes!

My marzipan recipe still used egg whites, however, I started pondering an egg-free option since not everyone can use eggs – let alone raw eggs!

I jumped back to the starting point and checked the Wikipedia page for marzipan. I found out that the original marzipan recipe contained just almonds, confectioner’s sugar, and water.

Aha! Water! I really wondered if water would work as a binding agent instead of egg whites also in my Sugar-Free Marzipan. Regular marzipan uses sugar, which is an excellent binding agent, but my new Sugar-Free Marzipan recipe – that I call now Sugar-Free Marzipan 2.0 – used our Ketokamu Makeuttaja, an erythritol-based sweetener which lacks many qualities of sugar. Water combined with sugar would make perfect marzipan, but what about water and erythritol? Could they make fine marzipan?

I had no other choice than try out what would happen if I used water instead of egg whites. I mixed the almond flour and the Makeuttaja and decided to add 3 tablespoons water, so a tad more than the weight of an egg white.

After kneading the flour-sweetener-water mixture for about one minute, the mixture started turning into a sturdy and pliable mass. I was almost shocked at how perfect it turned out!

The marzipan was easy to mold, and it held well together. To be honest, I didn’t notice any difference between the egg white and the water versions. Marvelous!

Encouraged by my new Sugar-Free Marzipan 2.0 recipe, I decided to post the recipe here on my blog as well. Naturally, I couldn’t use Makeuttaja as it’s not available in the international market, but I had to choose a sweetener available worldwide.

Powdered erythritol was the obvious choice for the sweetener. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was slightly terrified if it would work, as our Makeuttaja also contains stevia and a unique natural flavoring that affects the qualities of the sweetener.

To my relief, pure powdered erythritol worked as perfectly as Makeuttaja, producing excellent Sugar-Free Marzipan that I was delighted to enjoy in different shapes and forms.

I was so happy with my recipe that I made several batches of marzipan – some of which I colored with natural colors – and consumed a good deal of keto marzipan treats during this week. All in all, this new recipe was a winner compared to the old recipe (that by the time was the most popular Sugar-Free Marzipan recipe on the web!). This updated version uses powdered erythritol instead of erythritol crystals as powdered erythritol wasn’t available ten years ago. This new version uses super-fine almond flour instead of more coarse almond meal. Moreover, this Sugar-Free Marzipan 2.0 has water instead of raw egg white – a real upgrade when it comes to tolerability and shelf life.

Here’s the recipe for you to enjoy:

 
 

Nutrition information	In total	Per 1 oz (30 g)
Protein	50.5 g	4.2 g
Fat	107.6 g	9.0 g
Net carbs	13.9 g	1.2 g
kcal	1263 kcal	105 kcal

 

Tips for variations

This basic recipe makes perfect marzipan, however, I know several people who cannot stand the flavor of bitter almond. For those, rosewater or orange flavoring are excellent options. Actually, when making chocolate confections for our Ketokamu members, our Ketokamu CEO Olli mentioned that he ate chocolate confections with orange-flavored marzipan instead of bitter almond. Orange-flavored marzipan was more approachable than bitter almond. 

Encouraged by that, I made marzipan flavored with natural blood orange flavoring as I didn’t have any regular orange flavoring. The confections turned out unbelievably delicious! There was a whole almond in the center surrounded by mouth-watering blood orange-flavored marzipan in these homemade confections. The confections had a double layer of extra-dark chocolate with 92% cacao. Lastly, I had again sprinkled crushed freeze-dried bilberries on top. So totally yummy!

Instead of pure erythritol, you can certainly use sweetener combinations to this treat — like I used our Ketokamu sweetener that consists of erythritol, stevia, and natural flavoring. There are combinations of natural sweeteners like erythritol, stevia, monk fruit, and allulose in the market, and you can certainly experiment with these – as long as they are in powdered form. You can naturally dust them in a blender if they are crystals.

Alternatively, you can add a pinch of powdered stevia, or get fancy with flavored stevia drops. If you use liquid sweetener, mix it with water to better distribute it to the marzipan. Great flavored stevia options are naturally orange stevia, but also toffee stevia and lemon stevia make a fascinating twist. Blueberry and pomegranate stevia is yet another fabulous option, too.

You can naturally color the marzipan with natural colors. The green cake in the photo above is colored with spirulina-derived coloring. There are many excellent natural coloring options in the market, so feel free to experiment with them. Never use artificial colorings!

 

General prattling

Most of the week I spent still in our summer house. However, I returned to Tampere, where we had our Ketokamu core team meeting on Friday. Since I had made lots of marzipan for my blog post, I naturally served marzipan-filled chocolate confections and laskiaispullat for the team members.

On the weekend, I baked another cake to celebrate 1,000 members of our Finnish keto baking Facebook group. The group is growing fast, which makes me really happy!