Low-Carb Hazelnut Butter Cookies (Egg-Free)

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Hazelnuts are wonderfully low in carbs and they taste delicious in various dishes from savory salads to Nutella and other sweet stuff. However, their taste is somewhat powerful and that’s why they need something else to tame down that characteristic flavor. Hazelnut cookies, for example, cry for something milder tasting in addition to hazelnut flour. If you use only hazelnut flour, the cookies taste pretty strong, almost too strong, at least that’s how I find it.

Well, mainstream recipes would naturally use wheat flour in addition to hazelnut flour also for binding, but that’s an inferior option, if you ask me. After so many people ruining their health with excess amount of carbs, starch and grains, I really cannot recommend wheat flour. Luckily almond flour is a perfect option for low-carbers and people who follow ketogenic diet. Almond flour is mild in taste and it accompanies hazelnut flour extremely well. That’s why these delicious Low-Carb Hazelnut Butter Cookies contain both flours in perfect harmony — together with real butter that makes any cookie a mouth-watering delicacy!

 

 

Tips for making the Low-Carb Hazelnut Butter Cookies

As always, I want to keep my recipes really simple without sacrificing anything taste-wise. These cookies are no exception: you need just one bowl to combine and mix all ingredients. Traditional recipes just seem to be too complicated with combining first dozens of dry ingredients and dozens of wet ingredients and then gradually mixing this and that to reach a mediocre result. (Am I exaggerating here? Well…) Why bother when you can get even better result quicker and with much less effort? Yep, at least I’m too lazy to use too many ingredients and too many phases when preparing something.

But, let’s take a look how to make these buttery and super-delicious melt-in-your-mouth cookies:

Take a medium bowl and pour in the hazelnut flour…

 

…almond flour…

 

…powdered erythritol…

 

…butter…

 

…and the vanilla stevia.

 

Mix…

 

…and mix…

 

…until well mixed.

 

Shape the dough into 12–16 balls.

 

Flatten the balls with wet fingertips. (No need to wet your fingertips if you use gloves like me…)

 

Bake in the preheated oven for 7–10 minutes.

 

Let cool completely before removing the cookies from the baking sheet (important!). The cookies are very fragile when hot, but they will hold well together once cooled.

 

Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

Nutrition information	Protein	Fat	Net carbs	kcal
In total:	26.2 g	152.8 g	8.8 g	1524 kcal
Per serving if 12 servings in total:	2.2 g	12.7 g	0.7 g	127 kcal
Per serving if 16 servings in total:	1.6 g	9.6 g	0.6 g	95 kcal

 

 

My Low-Carb Hazelnut Butter Cookie experiments

I had bought hazelnut flour a very long time ago, and since it was about to expire, I had to invent some use for it. The reason I had bought the flour was that I really wanted to try out making hazelnut cookies but I simply was lacking time for that. Well, now it was about a time, I didn’t want to waste the precious hazelnut flour.

Since hazelnut flour tastes so powerful — at least in my opinion so powerful that I wanted to use something else in addition to it — I was going through my pantry and checking which ingredients I could use together with the flour. Coconut flour, which is my favorite flour, wasn’t really good for cookies. It needed some extra tricks if you wanted to make crunchy cookies, like long baking time and lots of butter. But coconut flour is perfect for cakes and muffins.

After a short pondering I decided to use almond flour, my other favorite flour. Almond flour makes great cookies, crunchy and delicious tasting.

I have many cookie recipes where I use whey protein, so this time I wanted to use something different. Well, the reason I use whey protein is simply because it helps hold the cookies together. I wasn’t sure if my hazelnut cookies will hold together without whey protein. I wasn’t in the mood for using cream cheese either, again I have other cookie recipes where I use cream cheese for binding, but this time I wanted to use something else. Butter sounded like a great option, however I wasn’t sure how the cookies would work without whey protein, if they hold together at all or if I will end up with just some fatty and browned messy mass.

Since I make my own powdered erythritol nowadays with my great blender (the Grind Grains program makes it in a few seconds!), I decided to use homemade powdered erythritol instead of erythritol crystals. To reduce the cooling effect, I wanted to use some other sweetener in addition. Vanilla stevia was perfect, it comes with delicious vanilla flavor and high-quality stevia flavor without bitter aftertaste.

Well, the only way to find out if my cookies will hold together was simply to try out. For my first experiment, I just took the ingredients and the amounts based on my gut feeling. No sophisticated calculations or formulas here, except maybe on a subconscious level.

To my surprise my calculations happened to be just right, only the amount of sweetener had to be reduced because the cookies were far too sweet to my taste. I think that in the final recipe they are still quite on the sweet side, so you can reduce the amount of the powdered erythritol to 1/4 cup (60 ml) if you don’t like very sweet taste.

But not so fast, there was more to come: When I took the cookies from the oven I was devastated: I touched one cookie and it was just soft mass (like I had anticipated!), no way it would be able to hold together. I declared my test as disaster, but anyway wanted to wait and see what happens when the cookies cool down. My (usually non-existing) patience paid off, the cooled cookies held well together and they were deliciously crispy, buttery and tasted fantastic! Moreover, there was just the right amount of hazelnut flavor so that it wasn’t overpowering.

 

 

 

 

 

Tips for variation

Yes! It’s time for the tips how to get some variation to these cookies. My top 5 recommendations are:

• Chopped hazelnuts
• Dark chocolate chips
• Dark chocolate glaze (Just place a piece of dark chocolate on a hot cookie, let stand for 5 minutes and spread with a knife. Let cool down.
• Freshly grated orange peel, or orange flavoring
• Hazelnut stevia instead of vanilla stevia (for the real Hazelnut lovers!)

 

What would you add to these cookies?

 

 

My book is out soon!

As you might know, my Easy Everyday Recipes cookbook is going to be published in Finnish soon. I’ve added my story and some general information about ketogenic diet because the concept is not well known yet here in Finland. We just decided the cover of my book: