Chewy Ginger Cookies - Low-Carb, So Simple! - Gluten-Free, Sugar-Free Recipes with 5 Ingredients or Less (2024)

Sugar-free, gluten-free, egg-free, yet full of brisk ginger flavor, mellow vanilla and tender chewiness. Get yourself warm and in a good mood with these tasty tidbits served with a cup of tea or coffee. Add the finishing touch and make these cookies festive holiday treats by glazing them with Low-Carb Lemon Glaze, a bonus recipe in the end of this post!

Tips for making the Chewy Ginger Cookies

The cookie dough is very easy to make and doesn’t necessarily need any chilling. However, if you live in a hot climate you might want to keep the rest of the dough in the fridge while handling one part. Anyway you can chill the dough for a couple of hours if you like, but according to my experiments it doesn’t necessarily need chilling.

It’s fastest and easiest to mix the ingredients by hand. Just knead the dough until it’s smooth. This shouldn’t take more than a minute. It’s a good idea to start with 3 oz (85 g) cream cheese and add more if the dough feels too crumbly.

When rolling out the dough, it is as well to bear in mindthat thicker dough is easier to handle than thinner one. Especially for larger cookies thicker dough is a must, otherwise the cookies might break when transferring them to the baking sheet.

In case you don’t have time or lust for using cookie cutters, you can just roll out the whole doughbetween two pieces of parchment paper, remove the topmost paper and cut the dough with a knife or pizza cutter into squares. Bake the whole thing, let cool and break into squares.

My experiments with the Chewy Ginger Cookies

I spent most of the week meeting my in-laws in Germany, that’s why I didn’t want to sit down and write a lengthy post about my experiments. I wanted to concentrate on fine-tuning my cookie recipe instead. I guess you don’t mind.

There was a great weather in Germany. A bit brisk and still green everywhere. You could smell the fall, especially in the evenings. It’s afascinatingsmell, sweet and full of adventures and excitement. Anything can happen in those crepuscularmoments between dusk and dawn.

What was happening in my homelandFinland was distant, I didn’tscratch my headover the news about snowstorms, outages and degrees of frost. However, the reality was aslap in the face when we arrived in the snowy and frozen Helsinki. Fortunately the worst snowstorms were over, and the bus took us safely home where the cold bedroom with 55 °F(≈13 °C) was waiting for us. Luckily our neighbor — a sweet andkind lady — had pushed away most of the snow from our front yard. I baked her favorite cakein return for her kindness.

But back to this recipe. I had developed this cookie recipe for a while, and now it just needed fine-tuning.In that freezing cold I fine-tuned this recipe wanting to make the flavors as warming and tasty as possible. And simple as well, of course. I reached my goal, a couple of cookies with a cup of hot coffee made my cold day into a lively and vibrant one.

Luckily fine-tuning the recipe didn’t need too much effort before I was completely satisfied. The be-all and end-allwas increasing the amount of cream cheese. First I used 3 oz (85 g), which made okay cookies, but they were a bit fragile and I couldn’t cut out proper snowflake cookies about which I was a bit disappointed. I just thought there is nothing I can do for that — except add wheat flour or other no-no stuff.

After increasing the amount of cream cheese to 4 oz (115 g) the cookie dough was easy to handle, nicely smooth and the best of all, I could cut out perfect snowflakes!

Also the amount of erythritol needed a bit adjusting. Too much, and the cookies would taste like marzipan and you could feel the cooling effect of erythritol. Too little, and the cookies wouldn’t be sweet enough and the ginger would be overpowering.

I got an idea to use vanilla stevia in addition to erythritol, and that really made my taste buds singing! Also my toddler savored the raw dough uttering “Yum!” after each and everybite.

Tips for variation

Instead of ginger, you can naturally use other spices. Below some ideas:

• 1 teaspoon freshly ground organiccardamom. Cardamom — together with vanilla stevia — makes great “bun” cookies. At least I always associate cardamom with buns 🙂 You can make cinnamon bun cookies by adding 2 teaspoons ground organic cinnamonin addition to cardamom
• 1 teaspoon organicorange peel granulesand 1 teaspoon ground organicginger
• 1 tablespoon cinnamonand 2 pinches (2 ml) ground organic allspice.

For real festive holiday treats with extra bite of piquancyyou can make Low-Carb Lemon Glaze, which I developed especially for these cookies: