Making and decorating all sorts of cookies and sweets has been a Christmas tradition in my family for a very long time, and I really love it. I lack any kind of artistic creativity in most of my life but I do love making food look pretty, so cookie decorating is right up my alley. So I was going to be damned if I couldn't find a way to include M.
These sugar cookies are on the order of 2.5:1, so on his new ratio I have to give him a bit of oil with each one. If you make all the cookies roughly the same size, you can divide out the batch's macros evenly; if like me you have some that are smaller, I made the assumption that two star cookies equaled a single tree cookie and therefore each star needed half the oil of a tree. (This is a slight overestimate but I always aim to be conservative on this)
I want to highly recommend The Sprinkle Company on Etsy for keto-friendly sprinkles! There are all kinds of colors and types; I went for the Christmas mix and for some Edible Glitter in a few different colors. Quick heads up to anyone else navigating a nut allergy - some of her sprinkles use almond extract as flavoring, so I had to forego the Unicorn mix, sadly.
Sugar Cookies
My recipe is an adaptation of this Charlie Foundation recipe.
Ingredients:
20g coconut flour
120g macadamia nut flour
8g arrowroot starch
40g European butter, cut into small cubes
74g ghee
50g egg (~1 egg)
Splash of Baker's vanilla flavoring
30g granulated Swerve sweetener
Note: I don't often use Swerve as a sweetener for baking, but as with regular cookies, there's a texture benefit to being able to cream the butter with granulated sugar. The sweetener is optional in this recipe but I wanted to make it as close to our usual Christmas cookie recipe as possible. You can decrease the amount here if you want the ratio to increase a bit or if you want less sweetness.
Directions:
Cream the butter, ghee, and sugar together in a food processor (I used the processor attachment for my immersion blender), then add the egg and vanilla and pulse a few more times to mix. Add the dry ingredients and pulse until all ingredients are mixed well; the dough should hold together but it will look fairly grainy. Scrape out of the food processor into parchment paper, wrap, and freeze for at least 30 minutes. (You can freeze it for longer if you're making ahead)
Following the freezing, roll it out between sheets of parchment paper to about 1/4" thickness and cut out into shapes. Rub some oil around the edges of cookie cutters to prevent them from sticking; place cutouts onto parchment paper on a cookie sheet. I found that I had to re-freeze between cutting sessions or else it got too sticky to work with; I got into a rhythym of rolling out and cutting, squishing the remaining dough back together and rolling out again, and then putting that rolled out sheet back in the freezer for 10 minutes before cutting.
Bake at 350 deg F for around 10 minutes but keep an eye on them starting around 7 minutes. I found my trees, which are about 3" tall, were starting to brown around the edges at about 9 minutes, and the stars at about 7 minutes. YMMV depending on the size of cookie cutter you're using.
Remove and cool for 2-3 minutes on the tray, then transfer to a cooling rack.
Icing
There are buttercream-ish ways to do cookie icing but I went with a royal icing-style option here; it's what I use on my regular cookies and I wanted to see if I could get close, plus the egg white provides some protein to the icing which would otherwise be basically all carb. I generally don't have qualms about using raw egg whites (we either by pasteurized eggs from the store or we use eggs from our own hens and I trust the sanitary conditions under which they live) but others may be more sensitive; there are egg white substitutes you can use but I don't have experience calculating them in. Just wanted to flag this in case it's an issue for anyone.
Ingredients:
1g cream of tartar
1 egg white (around 40g, if it's a bit less that's ok)
100g Swerve confectioner's sweetener
Splash of Baker's vanilla flavoring
Directions:
Add the cream of tartar to the egg white in a large bowl and mix on high speed until the egg white is much greater in volume and consists of lots of small bubbles. Then add the Swerve and vanilla and continue to beat until the icing is smooth and shiny.
At this point, you have some options. Depending on how big your egg white was, this icing may be very thick and hard to work with, so you may need to add water - a teaspoon or so at a time - and mix again to thin it out to the consistency you want (do you want to spread it with a knife? Do you want to use a piping bag and have it flood? Up to you!). You may want to add some food coloring.
I kept it relatively thick for my test batch and spread it on with a knife. It did dry out nicely so that I could comfortably stack the cookies, but it didn't flood into a flat smooth shell the way I'm used to royal icing doing. I could have thinned it out more but really, without real powdered sugar, it stays a bit grainy and is just not going to have the same consistency that traditional royal icing does. But it's close enough!
I recommend decorating with any sprinkles almost immediately after adding the icing. It does start to dry out quickly. If you need to store extra icing in the fridge, place a sheet of plastic wrap directly on the surface of the icing and that will keep it from drying out.
So overall, these cookies with the Swerve are 2.5:1 and the icing/sprinkles is all carb and protein, so I calculated that if I made the equivalent of 18 tree cutouts from the batch - which was actually a total of 24 cookies, since I made 12 trees and 12 stars - that I need to give M about 5g of oil on top of a tree cookie and 2.5g of oil on top of a star to hit a 3:1 ratio. To be clear, this is fairly approximate, but I was conservative in a number of estimates (I didn't end up using the entire batch of frosting but I divided out the macros of the entire batch as if I had) so if you're not super super sensitive, you should be okay.
Happy holidays, everyone! I wish you a seizure-free end to 2019.
Comments