Yes, I’m still sick and I still can’t hear out of my ear. But all I can do is laugh about it. Seriously. So I’ve gotten through the Christmas holiday without any cheating. It helped that my sister decided that for this Christmas, dinner would be finger foods and grazing. Awesome! So I made a Keto-friendly cheese fondue with fresh broccoli and celery. There was platters of ham with mustard, salami, cheeses, and dips. My mom made an artichoke green chili dip that was incredible on celery sticks. Of course there were tons of twice baked potatoes and crescent roll wrapped sausages – I wasn’t even tempted. My little nephew served as my “carb buddy” and ate the crescent rolls while giving me the sausages. Desserts weren’t an issue for me neither. I found a great recipe from ketoconnect.net for snickerdoodles.

Now that was an adventure for me – shopping in an organic market for ingredients I’ve never used before. I found the baking aisle and found the different kinds of flours. Almond flour is something you will see used in a lot of Keto recipes when it comes to something that is going to be baked. The downside – it’s expensive. I’m going to be doing some research on where to find it cheaper – like maybe in bulk from a website. One small bag (which contains maybe about 3-4 cups of almond flour) was about $14. Those are some expensive cookies. I also was introduced to the world of sweeteners.

I have been using Splenda for quite a number of years. I haven’t used real sugar since my South Beach Diet days in 2011. But I have been reading lately that Splenda is not a great choice, especially for Keto. So I got some Monk Fruit sweetener and some erythritol – which comes in quite some various forms including confectioner. I also got some liquid stevia. The recipe called for some brown sugar Truvia, but I couldn’t find any in the stores – so I had to use the Splenda brown sugar blend for that one. The cookies came out great. They were approved by all family members. I even tried cooking them at different time lengths and even at the longer time were they got a little more brown on the bottom, they were still moist and soft.

I also attempted the gingerbread cake recipe, but I think I did something wrong because it came out more like a scone than cake. It was still good though. It didn’t specify what kind of butter, so I used regular generic brand salted butter – maybe that was the issue. I’m going to try it again, but this time I’m going to use the Kerrygold Irish Butter. I’ve been reading a lot of recipes calling for this kind of butter and I saw it in the health food store. I used it in another batch of snickerdoodles and did notice a difference – creamier.