What you'll need:
¾ cup softened Butter
½ cup Eythritol
1 Egg
½ teaspoon Vanilla Extract
1 ¾ cup White Flour
¼ cup Chopped Nuts
Liquid Stevia (optional & to taste)
¾ cup Powdered Xylitol *
How to:
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Beat butter and erythritol until fluffy. Add egg and vanilla, beat again. Add flour and nuts, beat until well mixed. I would recommend tasting the dough now to see if it needs any more sweetener. If it does, add a few drops of liquid stevia.
- Shape dough into little balls and place on ungreased cookie sheet. (Mine turned out about the size of golf balls ;)
- Bake 20 minutes or until lightly browned.
- While cookies are still warm, drop a couple at a time into a resealable plastic bag with the powdered xylitol. Shake until coated. Repeat until all cookies have been covered.
Makes approx. 18 cookies.
*To powder xylitol or erythritol, you can run in through your blender. I had great luck doing this, but it is a little more gritty than actual powdered sugar. (Next time I think I'll blend it longer.)
Ingredient information:
Using a mixture of sugar substitutes usually produces the best, sugar-like results.
Erythritol bakes the best for me, usually browning in a way most similar to sugar. It is, however, only about 70% as sweet as sugar.
Xylitol is on an even ratio with sugar's sweetness, but it doesn't bake quite as well for me.
Stevia is extracted from Stevia leaves and the extracts on the market can be up to three hundred times sweeter than sugar. It doesn't brown and looses some of its sweetness while baking so, if you use it, you would probably want to taste as you go, and go sweeter than you would think.
Both Erythritol and Xylitol are 'sugar alcohols'. They have a lower glycemic index than sugar and fewer calories. Some diabetic people can use these sweeteners, but others cannot. Unfortunately, some people also have stomach problems (usually in the form of diarrhea) from using these sweeteners. If you've never used them before, you might want to go fifty/fifty with them and sugar.
If you want to use actual cane sugar in this recipe, just leave out the stevia and it should be plenty sweet.
To make this gluten free, you can easily substitute a gluten free flour or flour mix in place of the white flour. I've used Spelt flour in other cookies and it's worked well.
I used pecans in my cookies, but you could use your favorite or - if you cannot eat nuts or don't like them - these cookies are good without them too.
