BochaSweet keto cookies

Keto chocolate-chip cookies by BochaSweet:

Note the rough texture.

See the burned chocolate despite my having followed the instructions?

Among the packs of things I'd bought from BochaSweet while I was in America was this one pack of cookie mix: BochaSweet keto chocolate-chip cookies, chips included, with everything sweetened with BochaSweet. Originally, the company had been batting a thousand with its granular sweetener, a 1:1 replacement for sugar that I very much liked. Then, while I was in the States, I ordered the faux sugar, faux brown sugar, and several other items: a cookie mix, a brownie mix, a pancake/waffle mix, and a vanilla-cake mix. I ended up making the cookie mix Friday night... and while I'm still processing the experience, I can't say that I recommend it.

First, the instructions felt a bit incomplete—something I couldn't have known until I'd tried following the instructions as printed to make the cookies. The package comes with a dry mix of almond flour, sweetener, collagen powder, psyllium-husk powder, sugar-free chips, etc.—only 1 g of net carbs per serving (BochaSweet can apparently be subtracted the way sugar alcohols can when you're calculating net carbs: it just passes through your system, or so they say). You have to add melted butter, warm water, and one egg. That's it for liquids. The result is a clumpy mass that looks and feels more like slightly wet brown sugar than cookie dough.

I was able to make exactly twelve cookies with the amount of mix provided. The instructions said to bake everything at 325ºF (163ºC) for 12-14 minutes. No recommendations were given as to whether to use a cookie sheet, a cake pan, a glass baking dish, or what. Or whether to add parchment paper. And unlike the almond-flour-cookie recipes I've tried in the past, this recipe gave no recommendation to press the raw cookies down since almond-flour dough tends not to spread much during baking the way regular cookie dough does. Result: by the 12th minute, I could smell something burning in the oven, so I took my thin, metal baking tray out and let the cookies cool. Then I did a second batch (six cookies per tray), with much the same results despite setting my timer for eleven minutes and thirty seconds. As it turned out, the burning was mostly from the sugar-free chocolate chips at the bottom of each dough ball: melting, running a bit, and burning to the tray's bottom. The cookies didn't spread at all, so the result was twelve golf balls (originally laid out via ice-cream scoop). Some people like that sort of thick cookie, but I don't. I prefer mine flat, crunchy on the rim, and chewy/soft in the center. With lots of chips all the way through, preferably unburnt.

While I'm still not sure how much I like these cookies, I can definitely say that the All Day I Dream About Food recipe is a thousand times better. Now that I've used up this cookie mix, I'll stick to ADIDAF from now on. Nah, I don't think I can recommend these.

Thus far, BochaSweet is not wowing me with its pre-made products. The lemon-poppy protein bars were okay, but the chocolate-peanut-butter ones were boring; so was vanilla-almond crunch. The sodas were utterly horrible; my buddy Mike, equally horrified, marveled several times about how somebody at the company had had to sign off on these sodas' taste, and that person really ought to be fired. (It's the same kind of idiot who crows about how a Beyond Meat burger patty "tastes just like real meat.") With the cookie mix also being something of a failure, I'm really losing faith in BochaSweet's ability to create anything other than granulated faux sugar. I now fear how the vanilla cake and chocolate brownie will turn out, and the only thing I'm really looking forward to is the pancake/waffle mix because, after all, how can you mess that up (famous last words, ja?)?

Anyway, if you're considering BochaSweet, my recommendation thus far would be to stick with the faux sugars—table sugar and brown sugar. Stay clear of the other stuff. So far, those things have been reliably unsatisfactory, varying from barely mediocre to actively nasty.