These delicious sugar free keto snack bars do away with the added sugar and carbs of your typical store candy – with a great nutty flavor from the combination of chocolate and hazelnuts, the perfect sweet keto snack recipe!
They make for a great transitional, low carb snack on your keto journey, calming any sweet tooth cravings until you can wean yourself off of sweet foods.
Add to that the fact they’re vegan, packed with healthy fats from nuts and fiber, and you’ve got a great low carb snack.
What’s so great about this low carb snack recipe is that these can easily be prepared in advance and kept in the refrigerator for those moments where cravings get too much, or for a sweet treat here and there, a reward for sticking so well to the rest of your cleaner eating diet!
How to make Keto Snack Bars
These are chewy bars (as most keto bars are without added sugars and starches etc.) with a rich, ganache like flavor which pairs perfectly with hazelnuts, almost like nutella!
These keto friendly snacks can be prepped in 15 minutes or less, perfect to prepare in advance.
After an hour or so in the fridge these come out with the just the right amount of firmness to eat without them disintegrating like so many low-carb bars do.
Being so rich in flavor, you might wonder about the carb content? These do not contain any sugar or overly processed ingredients. So these are 100% Keto friendly snack bars with only 2 net carbs per bar.
Upgrade Your Low Carb Snack Bars
Working out a lot? You can add some more protein to these these bars by adding some Keto protein powder, chocolate or vanilla flavor, or even hazelnut if you can find one.
We like the Perfect Keto collagen protein powder as a well rounded addition to the keto diet, ideal if you’re more active and do regular exercise/weightlifting and want to add more protein to your keto diet.
Another great tweak to these Keto snack bars is to add a pinch of instant coffee granules for more of a nutty, mocha flavour and a caffeine boost.
Those would go brilliantly with our Coffee Mocha Smoothie for a quick, fat fuelled start to the day.
Once you make these, be sure to store in the fridge, wrapped individually in parchment paper. As they have a high-fat content from the nuts and coconut oil, they may melt and bind to one another if allowed to warm up.
For longer shelf life, you can freeze the bars in the freezer. Make sure you remove from the freezer at least 10-15 minutes before consuming it.
Tips and Recommendations for the Best Keto Chocolate Bars
- Check your nut butter: Some people find their keto candy bars don’t set well in the fridge, others find that the mixture can be too dry to spread. This can usually be traced back to the huge variety you find between different brands of nut butter.
For the best low carb chocolate bars, try to find nut butters without any added ingredients (especially sugar to keep things keto), but also look out for other additives, as these can alter the texture and ability of the mixture to set.
Use a nut butter that is somewhat runny, not the dried, hard bits you often find at the bottom of an older jar. You want to be able to bind all the ingredients together well so they don’t crumble. - Chill your bars thoroughly: It’ll be tempting to cut the time short, but these really do need a decent amount of time in a cold fridge, an hour is the minimum really. If for some reason they don’t set, try putting your keto snack bars in the freezer, you can store them in here then move the fridge shortly before eating if you prefer a more solid bar.
Just remember to put a layer of parchment paper or similar between bars when storing, so they don’t stick together!
We hope you love these keto snack bars, drop us a message in the comments with any suggestions or tweaks you may have made to this recipe, we love to get your input.
Not in the mood for DIY? We’ve got a great list of ready to eat keto snacks to buy, and plenty more easy keto snack recipes here on I Eat Keto.
Keto Healthy Snack Bars
Ingredients
- 115 g 1 Cup Blanched hazelnuts
- 40 g 1/3 Cup Almond flour
- 1 tbsp cocoa powder
- 50 g 1/4 Cup Powdered monk fruit allulose blend or desired sweetener
- 1 heaped tbsp Almond butter or any nut butter
- 15 g 1/2 oz Coconut oil, softened
Instructions
- Gather your ingredients.
- Place blanched hazelnuts in a food processor and process until coarse.
- Add almond flour, cacao, sweetener, almond butter, and coconut oil.
- Process until you have a smooth paste.
- Transfer the mixture into a paper-lined loaf pan.
- You can top with some hazelnuts or leave as it is. Place in a fridge for at least 1 hour, preferably more.
- Cut into bars and serve. You can cut in four or six bars.
Notes
- To blanch the hazelnuts yourself, boil the hazelnuts in water with 2 tbsp of baking soda to soften them. Once blanched, drain immediately and let dry.
- Try toasted the hazelnuts before blitzing them to bring out more flavor.
Nutrition
- by
-
These look good but why not use hazelnut butter instead, since we want to end up with a paste? I’m new to keto recipes so, is there a reason here to start from whole hazelnuts instead of hazelnut butter? Thanks
Does the size of the loaf pan make any difference and I assume parchment paper is lining the pan OR do you need one in an aluminum pan-size sprayed w/cooking or baking spray-8.5 x 4.5 x 2.5 Inch
Please advise-thank you👍🏼
How is this converted to cups?
Hi Amber, I’ve just updated with cup measurements for you – I’m in the UK here so more used to using grams, sorry! If you give it a go with those measurements let me know how it goes. Thanks!
Hi, these are delicious but I can’t get them to set…I’ve had to put them in the freezer, do you know why this would be?
Hi Amy, thanks for your comment! I’m not too sure exactly what the cause would be. I would first check the nut butter you’re using – I find the consistency can vary a lot from different brands, some much more oily than others. The other thing to watch for is any additives to the nut butter, as some have additives put in specifically to prevent the butter from getting too hard when refrigerated.
Let me know how they get on in the freezer. I’ll do a little more research and add a note to the recipe for future if I can find the cause!
These were delicious! Will make more for sure, thanks!
My mixture was dry what did I do wrong? Certainly looked nothing like the pictures
Hi Jessica, thanks for your comment! Not too sure what would cause the mix to be too dry, it could be a few different things. It does need to blended for a long time for the hazelnuts to get the hazelnuts to really break down, release their oils into the mix and go smooth.
It may also come down to the consistency of your nut butter. Brands tend to vary a lot so it’s worth experimenting. As you can see from the pictures, the almond butter we used was quite smooth and spreadable, but I know I’ve bought plently of nut butters that were almost rock solid coming out of the jar!
If in doubt, you can always increase the amount of oil or nut butter slightly to soften up the mix further next time.
Enjoyed these, nice bit of crunch. Gonna make up a bigger batch for round 2
I use ground almonds as I dont find any difference except price and added a bit extra peanut butter with the tablespoon of extra of coconut flour and they worked out perfect. I just use a nutra bullet as well. I didn’t have all almonds but had a pack of flacked almonds worked just the same
Hi mine did not set in the fridge, they remained the same texture
Can I put it in the freezer? Also where do u think I went wrong?
Hmm not too sure, did you make any substitutions? In particular the coconut oil or nut butters as they’re going to help set the mixture.
I would check the ingredients on your nut butter for any additives etc. Often they add stuff to keep the nut butter spreadable even at low temperatures, this could be the cause perhaps?
Recipe looks great! What would you suggest as an alternative for almond flour?
Hi Nicole, thanks! You can swap out the almond flour for coconut flour, although it tends to be more absorptive than almond flour and dry things out. To balance that out I’d use a little more coconut oil.
Let me know how it goes!