Low Carb Chocolate Chip Cookies

I am once again on one of my low carb cycles and the other day I decided that I was tired of not being able to have the occasional sweet treat. When you are doing low carb (or ketosis as it is called) anything with sugar is high carbs. Which sometimes sucks when you have a little bit of a sweet tooth like I do. So naturally I made my way to pinterest and typed in "Low Carb Desserts" in the search bar. I came across so many different recipes. I pinned a ton of them. But one of them caught my eye. 

There was a recipe for Low Carb Chocolate Chip Cookies. The pin directed me to a blog called Sugar Free Like Me where she shared the variations of the recipe that she had found on Blondie's Paleo & Keto Journey. So after reading through both blogs and looking at the variations that one lady made, I decided to go for it. They looked good, and seemed simple enough to make, so I decided to try them.

Now finding all of the ingredients wasn't necessarily the easiest or cheapest thing. The hardest thing to find was the sugar free chocolate chips. I called around to a few stores around town and nobody had them. So I of course took to Facebook to ask my friends in my town if they knew of anywhere that carried them. 

This ended up being a huge help. I had so many people suggest places for me to look. I had planned on going to a few places on my lunch break to look for them. But I ended up not needing to because I came back into my office after going outside to take a break and there was a bag of them sitting on my desk. One of my co-workers saw my post and happened to go to Wal-Mart a little bit later and she found them there. I did however find some other ones that are naturally sweetened with Stevia that I found at Whole Foods. I think I am going to try those in it next time. 

I went to Sprouts and Whole Foods to find the rest of the ingredients. I was able to find the almond flour and the coconut flour in the bulk section at Sprouts which saved me a ton of money. I only bought what I needed for the recipe and and didn't have to spend almost $20 on only two ingredients. The Xantham gum however was not easy to find. They had an 8 ounce bag at Sprouts for $12. But considering I only needed a half of a teaspoon for the recipe, I was not about to spend $12. Luckily Whole Foods had a small packet of it for $0.69. See, it pays to shop around. 

Once I had all of my ingredients I was ready to go! So after I got home from the gym last night and while I was making dinner, I threw these together and got them baking. I was a little unsure of them at first. The batter was a weird consistency and I wasn't sure how they were going to bake. But the batter tasted good, so I figured that was a good sign. I mean come on, if the batter tastes good, how could they possibly taste bad once you cook them?! 

I got them in the oven and once again when I went to pull them out the consistency looked weird, but I figured what the heck. I bit into one and I was completely surprised with how freaking delicious they were. I could have eaten the whole batch that I made. But I was good and I didn't. 

And guess what? They still tasted good this morning. I had one with breakfast and I actually thought that it tasted better than they did right out of the oven last night. And they were still soft. I love soft cookies, so these are just good all around in my book. 

Okay, onto the recipe. You can find the original one here on Blondie's Paleo & Keto Journey. 

Ingredients

-2/3c almond flour/meal

-1 cup sweetener (I used Swerve sweetener)

-3 eggs

-8oz Cream Cheese, softened (I used the 1/3 fat cream cheese)

-2 tbsp Butter, softened

-1/4 tsp Salt

-1/4 tsp Vanilla Extract

-1/2 tsp Xantham Gum

-1/2 tsp Baking Powder

-1/4 c Coconut Shreds (optional but amazing) I did not add these

-1 tbsp Coconut Flour

-1 tbsp Cashew Butter (optional, any nut butter will do)

-1 1/2 cups Chocolate Chips of choice (I used Hershey's Sugar Free Chocolate Chips and I actually only used 1 1/3 of a cup)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream together butter, cream cheese, cashew butter and sweetener.

Add in eggs one at a time, mixing well in between each.

Add remaining dry ingredients (except chocolate chips and coconut)  and the vanilla extract and mix well.

Add in chocolate chips and coconut (if you chose to add this) and then put the mix in the freezer to harden up a bit (10 minutes or so)

Spoon cookies onto lined baking sheet (about 1 tablespoon sized cookies) and bake for 20-22 minutes or until the top of the cookie is no longer moist and begins to brown on the raised parts. 

Nutritional Information-Calculated using Spark People's Recipe Calculator and a little bit of hand calculation for the chocolate chips because I couldn't find them in the database. 

Servings: About 30 cookies (could be more or less depending on how big you make your cookies. I used a cookie scoop and had about 30 cookies. 

Serving Size: 1 cookie

Calories: 85.48

Total Fat: 6.55 g

Cholesterol: 26.01 mg

Sodium: 64.13 mg

Potassium: 18.13 mg

Total Carbs: 5.91 g

Dietary Fiber: .36 g

Sugar Alcohols: 4 g

Total Net Carbs: 1.55 G

Protein: 1.80 g

I hope you guys enjoy this recipe and love these cookies as much as I do. I know for sure that they will become a staple in my house! Thank goodness for Pinterest some days!