Keto Christmas Tree Cookies… with my Mom!
I’m doing a very special installment of
#ILIKETOEAT today, with the most special of guests, starting now. Hey guys,
welcome to A.D. Keto. I am Aaron. This is the channel where we talk about the
ketogenic diet. We do some keto food vlogs, we talk a little bit about keto science,
and we do some keto recipes. If this is your first time here, please consider
subscribing, and do click the bell icon, so you get a notification whenever I
upload new content. Guys, my mom is here! My mom is here visiting. My daughter’s
birthday is today, She’s turning 12. My mom comes down usually every year at
this time to visit, and we decided that it would be a super fun thing to do to
try to recreate a keto version of the cookies, the Christmas cookies that she
has made for me for the past 40 years.
And what kind of cookies are they? Basic
sugar cookie. Regular flour, regular sugar, vanilla, a little orange juice… www.flightschoolusa.com Little
orange juice?! Yeah. Little orange juice and some vanilla. Okay. orange juice is new. I didn’t know
orange juice was in it. So there is gonna be no orange juice in these new ones, right? No. So yeah, anyway, they are these sweet, sweet little Christmas tree
cookies, and mom’s gonna help me make them. Right! So that’s the plan for today —
we’re gonna make these cookies. We do need to go out and get some ingredients
first, so we’re gonna do that right now. All right, so we’re off to find erythritol.
I neglected to order any from Amazon, and I can’t find any. I went to Whole Foods
the other day, and I went to Trader Joe’s and they didn’t have it. We can check
Stuyvesant Plaza, but I looked up that place that Sara suggested, and it said
that Yelp says they’re closed.
I think we might be out of luck here. OK, so we’ll
hit Wolf Road. Free advertising for Briggs Bail Bond,
everybody! We get you out. Hi there, how are you? I’m wondering if you guys have
erythritol. I was trying to recreate a childhood cookie recipe with low
carbs. Have you tried Swerve? Do you have Swerve? We don’t have it.
I’ve been looking for Swerve. Honest Weight’s got it. The thing with Swerve, Aaron, is that you have to add a little bit more than you would add sugar.
It’s not quite as sweet. It’s not exactly a one-to-one replacement. They say it is, but it isn’t. This is a cool place. I’d forgotten all about this place. My mom found the erythritol,
granular. We’ll have to grind it up, but the last bag in the place. Holy cow,
this is amazing. I love this place. Hi, how are ya? All right, how are you?
Great! We found absolutely everything we were looking for so we’re very happy. Really? Including me? Yeah! including you. She’s laughing through her teeth at me. I don’t think she’s sincere. You’re the best part! Do you know the 9-4 thing? No, what’s the 9-4 thing? Any store.
ANY store.
Really? The first digit’s a nine? Organic. The first digit’s a four? Conventional.
Interesting! Any store. That’s good to know! There you are! Thank you so much. Have a great day. Oh my god, I love that guy. So, crazy revelation: this place, Honest Weight Food Co-op, is the bomb. Loved our cashier dude. He was so awesome! He looked like Santa Claus. All right, so we’re back from our encounter
with Santa Claus, and we’re gonna start by making the last part of the recipe,
which is a sprinkle. I found a recipe for some sugar-free sprinkles which I
will link below, you can find it at sprinklesomefun.com, and it involves
this stuff, which is called glucomannan powder. And what we’re going to do is
basically mix this with some erythritol, some protein powder, and some egg whites.
Since we don’t have one of those cool you know little …what do you call those?
Pastry bags, we’re just gonna cut a little corner here, fill this up, and make
long lines that are gonna dry for five hours. So we gotta get this part over
with first, so let’s get into it.
Caroline, I know that you are super-excited about
cracking an egg with one hand, and giving us our egg white, so you want to
go to it? All right. Now we need just the white. Just the white…? Yup. But you told me to crack the egg! Yeah, we
needed just the egg white though. All right, it’s okay. Grab another egg. There
you go! Perfectly divided egg. Nicely done. Next,
we’re going to use some erythritol — half a cup — and we were only able to find the
granular variety of erythritol. But this recipe really calls for more of a
confectionery style, so we’re going to scoop our erythritol
right into this mortar and pestle, and I’m going to start going grindin’ ‘er up.
Normally, this could be done in a coffee grinder, but we don’t have one of those. Just half a scoop of this. Just half a scoop. You know, this
isn’t the ideal protein powder. It is vanilla, but it’s not whey protein powder.
It’s fine. All right, so we need to add half a
teaspoon of this glucomannan powder to this bowl, Caroline. Great. So we’re
going to combine our glucomannan, which is in there now, our egg whites, go ahead
mom, and our sweetener. And we’re gonna whisk this up. And it’s gonna seem a
little clumpy clumpy clumpy at first, but we’re gonna keep on stirring… oh we
forgot to put in the protein powder. Dump it in there. So we’re just gonna put this
into our ziplock bag, cut a hole in the corner, and make long lines on a baking
sheet.
It’s gonna be one big long sprinkle when we lay it out like that. And
then after they’re done drying, we’re just gonna chop ’em up. If you wanted to
do a colored sprinkle, you could add whatever food coloring you
would like. If you’re doing more than one color, you should divide up this dough.
Just make sure you have one Ziploc bag per color that you want to use. Okay, so
we’re just gonna cut a hole in the corner of the bag here.
Those are pretty…
that’s a pretty big hole. We don’t wanna… Maybe we can go to the other
corner? A slightly smaller hole? Because that looks like a really thick
sprinkle. That’s much better. Look at that FIRST
one though. That’s a gigantic sprinkle I can’t wait to have the cookie with those
sprinkles on Yeah, it’s leaking out the other end here. Our first hole is kind of
like, pooping out these other ones in the middle of our tiny rows. So we’re gonna
leave this tray of future sprinkles out for five hours. This is a cream cheese
cookie. The first thing we’re going to do is cream three-quarters of a cup of
erythritol and one cup of Kerrygold Butter. Next, we’re going to add four
ounces of cream cheese. Okay so next, we’re gonna add one egg. I think we’re
gonna put the coconut flour in first because that’s only half a cup.
Oh yeah.
And now this is two cups of almond flour. I’m gonna put a little bit in at a
time. Hopefully, it’ll mix in a little bit easier that way. Almond flour… One
teaspoon of pure vanilla. Oh, yeah. I will put it in a separate bowl and cover it up with
Saran Wrap and let it cool in the refrigerator for about four hours.
Shoutout to Saran Wrap! And now I’m gonna prepare the frosting that’s gonna
go on our cookies. This is basically the same recipe that Megha over Keto Connect
used in her ginger cake. If you want to see someone do it right, go check that
link out. Okay, so we’re gonna start by taking four ounces of our cream cheese
and blending it together with a quarter cup of our Kerrygold butter, and we’re
gonna blend it with a hand mixer until it’s fully incorporated. Then we’re going
to add half a cup of erythritol and a quarter teaspoon of pink salt.
And
then we’re just going to add some green food coloring until it looks the shade
of a tree. We totally forgot the vanilla extract, so
we’re putting it in after the fact. We’ll mix it right in. These are cool…yeah, they’re cool to the touch. They’ve just been drying on the counter for
about four hours. I’m just gonna break them apart, and these are gonna be
the sprinkles. It looks like mozzarella cheese. This is the ball of dough that we
refrigerated for four hours. I’m cutting it in half, just to make it easier to work with,
and I like to make it into a ball and then flatten it a little bit with my hands.
This is a lot moister than I had anticipated. And I think that’s pretty
good. This is a Wilton cookie cutter I really like it.
The bottom is metal, the
top is like rubberized plastic. Easy on the hands. And I think maybe we’ll be
able to get maybe six out of this, and we’re gonna put them in the oven at 350
for about ten minutes, but check it. This is very doughy. We’re adding some coconut
flour to eliminate some of the moisture that we have in this cookie dough
because it’s very hard to get up off the parchment paper once we cut them out.
So I can see already — this is kind of absorbing some of that extra moisture
that was in there, so I think this will work.
This is already working better, I
can tell you right now. We’re not going to roll it too thin, because I think that
was the problem with these first three. So we’re gonna try this now, and see how we do. Oh, that’s perfect. Look at that. So hopefully, we’ll be able to get them up
off the parchment paper a little easier, and onto the tray. They look good. And I don’t
know if you can see there, but this one is rolled a little thicker than these first
three that were so moist. I think that’s the key. We rolled them too thin, and they
were too moist. This is working much. oh look at that. Much better. I have a wooden rolling pin that I’ve had for 40 years.
I know there
are much better ones out there, but I kind of like this one. It’s my old friend. There we go. Okay, so we have one, two,
three, four that are rolled out thicker with the extra coconut flour, and three…
Our original three are kind of sticky, and we’ll see. So now we put them
in the oven. We’re gonna put them in at 350 for about 10 minutes, and check. The
color is interesting for cookie dough. It looks like oatmeal. So I’m not
gonna… I’m gonna cut one out now, and then try to get one more piece. I don’t want
them to be too thin. I think that that was the trick. We were making them… the regular
cookie recipe that I have, you can roll the dough pretty thin, and I’ve always
done that to try to get as many cookies as I could, but I think the trick with
this recipe is to not roll the cookie dough real thin.
Wonderful. We’ve taken the first batch out. We cooked this for about
12 minutes. With every recipe, it’s like trial and error until you get it just right.
This is one of the thinner cookies. This is one of the first three that I rolled
out, and they were so thin that they were very sticky, and I could barely get them
up off the parchment paper. So we rolled them thicker, but I guess… play with the
thickness. If I gotta eat ’em with a fork, I gotta eat ’em with a fork. Oh, OK. Look at the edges of the Christmas
tree shape. You can see that they’re brown, so those are done. I start frosting
at the tip of the Christmas tree. These are kind of fragile, so I’m going to go a
little light on the frosting, and we’re going to just have the green frosting,
lightly with the little sprinkles that we made today.
Just a few on each cookie.
This frosting smells great, and you might see the little white pebble-looking
things in there, that’s cream cheese. So we’re finally done making our epic
Christmas tree cookies. It’s been an all-day adventure. These right here are
the cookies that my mom has made for me every year for 40 years. This is like my
childhood, right here. This is the cookie. I was very excited to try to find a
low-carb version of this, and what we ended up with it was this guy, which you
can see — much bigger, and maybe a little uglier, but I’m down with this thing.
It
tastes, based on the batter that we had earlier,
tasted delicious. So you can see the back is really nice and golden brown around
the edges, so this is the guy. I’m gonna take a bite and see how it
tastes. Mmmm. Delicious You know I can taste in there most of
all? The LOVE. So good. And so much fun to make this with my mom today. You guys,
she’s been awesome. Mom, thank you so much. You took the reins when this recipe kind
of… like that first batch that we made, that was super soggy, I was like, “I
don’t know if this is even gonna work.” You were like, “Just give me some coconut flour, and we’ll fix it.” And we totally did, and mom saved the day.
We’ve found that
the thin ones held together better. Better. The big fat ones feel a little
bit more fragile, and they’re… they’re a little bit more crumbly. But at any rate,
they are great. I was telling mom earlier, just… just the thought of this cookie, of
eating something like this cookie, around the holidays, does weird things to me,
emotionally. I… I can’t really contain myself. She’s sent these cookies to me
every year, like I said, for 40 years. So great to have a low-carb option. Check
out the recipes that I link below. We kind of… it was a sort of mishmash of a
few different recipes that I found online. So I really hope you guys enjoyed
this video. I’m hopeful that my mom can come down again and visit, and do another
appearance on the channel again.
It was awesome to have her kind of like… You
should have seen her. At the beginning of the day, she was like, super-nervous about
it, but by the end of the day, she was like, “Oooh, this is awesome! I wanna have my own cooking show!” So adorable. So thank you, mom. I really am happy that you came down and I did this with me. So
guys, if you like this video, give it a thumbs up. Please consider subscribing if
you haven’t already. I hope you have a great day, and I will see you next time. And Mom, thank you so much. I love ya. I love you, too. All right, guys. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye! I’m doing a bear…[PBLTPBLT!] Off to a bad start…
