Things I learned holiday baking this year.

I was attempting to adapt old family recipes to my new life with low carbs. I learned several things in this process.

First: You can not completely swap granulated stevia for baking 1:1 for sugar in your recipe. THE PACKAGES LIE! You have to swap out half your sugar if you're going to be using granulated stevia or your cookies will not bake properly.

Second: You can sub in a good portion of almond flour into Mom's peanut butter cookie recipe and get a better result. These things stayed moist and delightful for longer than a day. Original recipe they kinda dried out pretty fast.

Third: You can replace the oatmeal in Grandma's peanut butter no-bake cookies with coconut.

Fourth: It's not a great idea to swap the sugar for stevia 1:1 in Grandma's peanut butter no-bake cookies. They don't set up properly unless you refrigerate them. At room temperature they basically turn into piles of soft, coconut filled peanut butter fudge. Still delicious, Beloved helped me take care of the evidence.

Finally, I learned that your sense of taste is 100000% improved by getting over the flu. The first batch of peanut butter cookies was made while I still had the flu. I was sure that I had messed them up horribly because they tasted utterly tasteless. I said to myself something was wrong because they had to at least taste like peanut butter. (I didn't let the family try any of those cookies because I was so sure I had messed them up.) Then I tried the recipe again after I was over the flu and I didn't feel like I was eating cardboard with nuts in it. It had actual flavor.