5-Ingredient Dairy-Free Egg-Free Keto Lemon Cookies

Are you ready to sink your teeth into these soft and chewy keto cookies, feel the brisk bite and the tart tang of sunny lemon? With only 5 ingredients and 1 bowl, you can create these super-easy keto lemon cookies that are luscious, nourishing, and satisfying.

How to make these Non-Dairy No-Egg Keto Lemon Cookies

As these cookies don’t contain any dairy or eggs, they are perfect for those who are intolerant or allergic to dairy or eggs. The cookies are also perfect for vegans as the recipe doesn’t include any animal-based ingredients.

To get enough mouth-watering lemon flavor, you’ll need one large (7 oz = 200 g) lemon and, more precisely, the peel and the juice of it. When grating the peel, be sure to grate only the yellow-colored part of the peel — avoid the white pith as it’s so bitter.

To make the cookies succulent and hold well together, you’ll need both lemon juice and oil. Personally, I prefer extra-virgin olive oil because it stands heating better than light olive oil (and it’s also healthier), plus it lends more flavor to the cookies. Yes, you can use EVOO also in sweet recipes!

I’ve used powdered erythritol for the cookies because I developed the recipe in our summer house and simply didn’t have a variety of sweeteners with me. Anyway, erythritol (powdered or granular) is my to-go sweetener, and I use it everywhere. Powdered erythritol suits well these chewy, cake-like cookies as the texture is so fine.

Instead of erythritol, you can use another keto-friendly natural sweetener, like stevia, monk fruit, or allulose. However, they behave in different ways in baking. Erythritol makes the surface of the cookies nicely crunchy while the interior stays soft and succulent. Stevia and monk fruit keep the cookies completely soft and cake-like all over. I don’t have a personal experience on allulose as it’s not available in Europe. I’ve got one bag from the US, but it’s so precious that I didn’t dare to use it in any experiments yet!

When baking with erythritol, the baked goods are soft when hot, but they get crunchier after cooling down. This is also why you should wait until the cookies have cooled down properly before you’ll remove them from the baking sheet. On the other hand, if you prefer a soft and cake-like texture, feel free to eat the cookies fresh. If you prefer crunchier cookies, you can wait a day or two for the consistency to harden.

That’s it, let’s take a look at how to prepare these simple yet scrumptious keto lemon cookies.

First, take a large organic lemon. Clean it and pat dry. Grate the peel (only the yellow part).

Squeeze the juice.

Take a bowl and combine 1 1/2 cups (350 ml) almond flour…

…1/2 cup (120 ml) powdered erythritol…

…1 teaspoon baking powder…

…the lemon peel…

…the lemon juice…

…and 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil.

Knead…

…until smooth and stiff dough forms, about 2 minutes.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Shape the dough into walnut-sized balls and place on the baking sheet.

Flatten the balls with your fingertips.

Here we go. Ready to bake.

Bake at 300 °F (150 °C) for 20-25 minutes, or until golden brown. Don’t let get too brown.

Remove from the oven.

Let cool until room temperature before removing from the baking sheet.

Enjoy!

How I came up with this easy keto cookie recipe

I’m spending this week in our summer house, concentrating on translating my Finnish keto book into English. Therefore, I don’t have a variety of ingredients and equipment with me.

After checking my idea list, I thought keto lemon poppy seed cookies sounded delicious and worth developing. I was actually planning a non-dairy no-egg version to make the recipe suitable also for those with food intolerances and allergies.

I do have a pie crust recipe in my Low Sugar, So Simple book with almond flour, water, and olive oil, and I was planning to use that as the base for the cookies. Instead of water, I was planning to use lemon juice. To get enough fruity and juicy lemon flavor, I wanted to add lemon peel, too.

I had stevia and erythritol (both granular and powdered) with me in the summer house, and I decided to use powdered erythritol to sweeten the cookies as the sweetness is much neutral and with less aftertaste than that of stevia, which tends to have a bitter, licorice-like aftertaste no matter how good quality stevia you use.

Well, those ingredients — lemon, almond flour, erythritol, and olive oil — were easy to obtain, but the problem was that I didn’t find any poppy seeds from the local stores! I would have had poppy seeds at home, but as I thought they are easy to get from any large store, I didn’t take them with me.

After checking the local big stores for poppy seeds and leaving empty-handed, I had to change my plans. Well, keto lemon cookies still sounded good even without poppy seeds, so I was planning to proceed with my fruity keto cookie recipe anyway.

I dug out the old pie crust recipe and started tweaking it for my cookie experiment. After some calculations, I took 1 cup (240 ml) almond flour, 1/4 cup (60 ml) powdered erythritol, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, and 1 teaspoon grated lemon peel. As you notice, this recipe didn’t contain oil as I wanted to see if the dough holds together without oil. When developing my original pie crust recipe, I added both oil and water because I noticed the dough holds well together like that. Oil also made the crust crunchy. But now, I wanted to see what happens if I leave out the oil from my cookie dough.

I combined the ingredients, knead the dough, shaped it into cookies, and baked. Surprise, surprise: the cookies held really well together even without oil. However, the texture was quite leathery. So, the oil was needed anyway to improve the texture. Moreover, there was not enough lemon taste to call the cookies lemon cookies. I’m happy that the batch was so small, so I didn’t have to waste more ingredients!

For the second test, I added equal amounts of lemon juice and extra-virgin olive oil. I was actually a bit hesitant to add extra-virgin olive oil rather than a lighter olive oil variety because the cookies were sweet, and you usually don’t use extra-virgin olive oil in baked goods. However, I thought, “Why not? Maybe the extra-virgin olive oil adds to the flavor anyway and makes the cookies even tastier!” I also tripled the amount of lemon peel.

This time, the cookies were clearly better both taste-wise and texture-wise. However, they were still a bit too hard. I actually added 1 teaspoon lemon juice to the rest of the batch (that made about 3 cookies) and noticed that the texture of the cookies was much better: soft and lush.

Here’s the photo of my experiments, all of which turned out a bit too hard. There are actually three different experiments in this bowl:

During the night, I got some improvement ideas on how to make the cookies even more lemony and softer. The next day, I was ready to take the photos and the videos for this post with the improved recipe. I actually didn’t know if my improvement ideas would work in practice, but I was so sure about those that I was willing to take the risk and shoot the photos and the video while trying them out in practice.

I actually got the idea of adding baking powder to make the cookies rise more and make them even softer and cake-like. And to get really lemony cookies so that you can really feel the burst of lemon, I used a whole lemon — actually all the peel and all the juice.

The cookies turned out amazing! The texture was a soft, pure pillowy pleasure — and what fireworks of tongue-tickling lemon flavor the cookies had! I was so positively surprised about the result and happy that my improvement ideas really worked so well.

Here’s the recipe for you to enjoy:

Continue to Content

5-Ingredient Dairy-Free Egg-Free Keto Lemon Cookies

Yield: 16

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 20 minutes

Additional Time: 20 minutes

Total Time: 50 minutes

Are you ready to sink your teeth into these soft and chewy keto cookies, feel the brisk bite and the tart tang of sunny lemon? With only 5 ingredients and 1 bowl, you can create these super-easy keto lemon cookies that are luscious, nourishing, and satisfying.

Print

Ingredients

• 1 large (7 oz = 200 g) organic lemon
• 1 1/2 cups = 350 ml almond flour
• 1/2 cup = 120 ml powdered erythritol
• 1 teaspoon aluminum-free baking powder
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 300 °F (150 °C).
2. Wash the lemon and pat dry. Grate the peel (only the yellow part).
3. Squeeze the juice from the lemon.
4. Combine all ingredients in a bowl, i.e., the almond flour, powdered erythritol, baking powder, lemon peel, lemon juice, and olive oil.
5. Knead until smooth dough forms, about 2 minutes.
6. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
7. Take walnut-sized balls from the dough and place onto the parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Flatten with fingertips until about 1/3-inch (8.5 mm) thick cookies.
8. Bake the cookies in the preheated oven for about 20-25 minutes, or until golden brown. Don't let get too brown.
9. Remove from the oven. Let cool until room temperature before removing from the baking sheet.
10. Once cooled, remove from the baking sheet. Store in a cool and dry place for about a week. The will cookies harden while storing.
    

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Tips for variation

Like I had initially planned, poppy seeds would lend a delicious crunch to these cookies, so feel free to add 1 tablespoon of poppy seeds to the dough.

For even more lemon flavor, feel free to replace half of the powdered erythritol with 20-40 drops of lemon-flavored stevia.

Adding 1 teaspoon vanilla extract lends an even more scrumptious and elegant taste to the cookies. Alternatively, you can replace half of the powdered erythritol with 20-40 drops of vanilla stevia.

I was crumbling the leftover cookies on top of my morning yogurt that also had wild raspberries. The cookies lent a fabulous crunch and lemon flavor — such a perfect match with sweet raspberries and smooth yogurt! The flavor was actually very close to cheesecake, so the breakfast really felt like pure indulgence.

Talking about cheesecake: if you have any leftover cookies, you can crumble them, add melted butter and press on the bottom of a springform pan to use as a crust for a no-bake keto cheesecake.

General prattling

This week has been amazing in many ways. First of all, I’ve had a really enjoyable and productive time here in the summer house. However, it got even more productive now — finally! — related to our Ketokamu chocolate products as Foodin, our chocolate manufacturer, got finally their machinery fixed, and we got the first test batches of our keto chocolate hazelnut spread and chocolate-covered raspberries.

I was actually visiting the Foodin factory on Monday to check the situation and the test batches. In this machine, there’s rolling the first-ever batch of our keto chocolate-covered raspberries:

I was driving to the Foodin premises from the summer house. That was about two and half hours of driving through snowy Finland. Right before arriving, I got a message from Foodin that the machine they have planned to use to produce the chocolate and hazelnut spread had broken. Well, I didn’t want to turn back but just went to visit there anyway. That was good, since after a while, they realized that another machine could be used to make the spread. What a relief! After three hours, I was standing with two jars of smooth and delicious keto chocolate hazelnut spread in my hands!

I’ve developed the recipe for the chocolate and hazelnut spread at home with my small stone melanger. I thought the consistency was pretty smooth, but I have to admit this industrially made version is unbelievably smooth and velvety!

Here are the jars of our keto chocolate and hazelnut spread. I keep one in the fridge and one at room temperature to see how they store and how the consistency will change over time.

Later in the fall, Foodin will produce our chocolate bars. We’ve got nice molds for those:

Last but definitely not least: one of my readers asked for a recipe for keto hamantaschen for her Purim celebrations. I’ve never made hamantaschen before, but I was eager to try out to make a keto version as it felt like a nice challenge.

I actually took this particular lemon cookie recipe and tweaked it to make the dough for the hamantaschen. Basically, I replaced the lemon juice and peel with water and increased a bit the amount of oil. I filled the hamantaschen with the keto chocolate hazelnut filling. I have to say I was extremely delighted and surprised how well they turned out! But the most important thing was that my reader, Anita, was also super-happy that I developed the recipe for her. Here’s a photo of my keto hamantaschen:

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