Christmas is coming up in a few days so I decided to try to make gingerbread / lebkuchen / pfefferkuchen / piparkoogid but not the regular high sugar version but a low carb, sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, grain-free version. These are my LCHF gingerbread cookies. Makes a ton of them.
What do you need?
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300 grams of hazelnuts
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300 grams of walnuts
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3 medium eggs
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half a packet of gingerbread spice (mix of cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, cloves, nutmeg etc, about 20 grams)
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sweetener
How to make them?
First of all, get your oven preheating to 200 degrees Celsius to roast your nuts (or you can buy them roasted from the grocery store).
Roast your nuts. It takes about 5–10 minutes depending on your nuts and oven. If they become fragrant and start to shed skins, they are ready. DO NOT take your eye off the nuts once they are in the oven. They can burn really fast and then you have nothing to make cookies from and have lost a significant amount of money.
After roasting your nuts, grind them in a food processor. You can even grind them until they turn into butter, that’s just fine.
Now add in seasonings and sweetener and the eggs. Let the food processor or a handheld electrical mixer do the work for you until you have a normal dough.
Wrap the dough in some plastic wrap an put the dough in the fridge for a few hours (or overnight). This ensures all the flavours have time to set in and mix well. The texture will also be better.
Some oil might come out of the dough so make sure to put a plate under the wrapped doughball. In my case quite a lot came out.
Now roll out the dough like you would a normal gingerbread dough. It’s oily so the process isn’t all that pleasant. I use a cellophane for rolling: makes sure nothing sticks to my work surface and also makes cleaning up so much easier. Cut out shapes with fun cookie cutters. That’s the fun part!
Put in the oven at 200 degress until golden brown.
Let the cookies cool down and decorate with a glaze. I’m yet to figure out how to make white glaze that sets like royal icing without sugar. If you have ideas let me know! You could use some dark chocolate for decoration.
Enjoy!
What about nutrition?
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The whole recipe is 4130 kcal, 111 grams of protein, 107 grams of total carbs (of which 63 grams is fiber, so grams of 44 grams of net carbs), 394 grams of fat.
If divided into 50 cookies, one cookie is 83 kcal, 2,23 grams of protein, 2,15 grams of total carbs (of which 1,26 grams is fiber, so 0,88 grams of net carbs per cookie), 7,87 grams of fat.
The easiest thing to do to get nutrition information for your cookies is to count how many cookies you got and devide the whole recipe by that number. The nutrition info is not 100% correct since a lot of oil extracted from the dough and the cookies are different weights and sizes. But hey: it’s the holidays! Don’t stress about the macros, these cookies are totally guilt-free and relatively “clean” (aside from the artificial sweetener).
Any other advice?
When I make these cookies next year, I will make one improvement: add in about 50 grams of flax seed flour, almond flour of protein powder that will suck in all the excess oil. The amount of good quality nut oil that was “lost” during the process of making the dough and the cookies was just ridicoulous.
Merry Christmas!
