Home made sugar free chocolate biscuits with Stevia

As you may know I have been searching for some sugar free biscuits for some time. I have found very few that I really like.  We even tried some butter shortbread which was sugar free and it was not as good as Lidl normal short bread and was three times as expensive.  So I started to wonder how difficult it would be to make some at home.

I wanted to use Stevia as it is a natural based sweetener.  Looking around a lot of the recipes on line  we just could not find one that met our needs.  One recipe claimed to be sugar free even though it used apple puree as a bulking agent which  made them no added sugar!

The problem one is faced with is that stevia is a lot sweeter than sugar.  This means that using stevia does not provide the bulk required to make nice biscuits. They would be too sweet.  I did find a stevia product made for baking but it was a mixture of stevia and sugar so was not acceptable for my purpose. 

To be honest I am not a great cook.  I'm never going to appear on "Great British Bake Off"!  I thought that I would start with something really simple and found these chocolate biscuits that required no rolling out.

http://bakinginspiration.com/recipe/52/chocolate-biscuits

I decided that I would need about 18gm of stevia to give the same sweetness as the 50 gm sugar so added 32 gm of Ground Almonds to give the same weight total as the sugar. 

The biscuits are really a shortbread and have a very good chocolatey flavour.on the downside they are a bit crumbly.  Overall, I think a good first attempt.  

The next time we do sugar free biscuits we will try something a bit more complicated perhaps a dough made with some egg in it.  One problem I anticipate is that sweeteners such as Stevie do not seem to caramelise in the same way as sugar so its not so easy to get a crisp golden brown texture.