These Italian almond cookies are surprisingly quick and easy to make with five ingredients and they taste incredible! They make for especially great Christmas cookies and are naturally grain-free, gluten-free and dairy-free.

For such a simple recipe, these cookies are crazy delicious. The outsides are firm and kind of crisp and the insides are chewy.

They’re just like the expensive imported Italian almond cookies that come individually wrapped and have all kinds of weird ingredients. This recipe just calls for almond flour, powdered sugar, granulated sugar, egg whites and almond extract.

Super easy + only 5 ingredients

These cookies are not exactly healthy – at all! – but at least there aren’t any weird ingredients. If you’re after something healthy, check out this roundup of Healthy Christmas Cookies.

These Italian cookies really are quick to put together. Don’t let the need to whip the egg whites put you off. It almost did for me.

I was like, “Naaah. I really don’t feel like getting out the mixer.” But then I realized that even with the need to whip the egg whites, it’s still quicker to make these cookies than most other cookie recipes.

By the way, if you need more Christmas cookie recipes, check out some of these!

100% Whole Wheat Dutch Kruidnootjes (Dutch Gingerbread Cookies)

Peppermint Chocolate Puddle Cookies

Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies

A naturally gluten-free Christmas dessert

Today’s recipe is also naturally gluten-free, grain-free and dairy-free, which is awesome for people who have family members with allergies but don’t really know what to make. You only need almond flour for this recipe!

Then after you make these cookies, you can then make my almond flour brownies which are super gooey, chocolaty and everything you’d want in a brownie. Even gluten-eaters love them!

The same goes for these almond flour chocolate chip cookies and almond flour banana muffins._

Almond flour variation

But back to these Italian cookies. Please note that your cookies may spread more or less than mine depending on the type of almond flour you use. If you use one that’s not very fine, then they’ll spread more.

I suggest doing a test cookie. If it bakes up nicely, then bake the rest.

If it’s too flat for you, you may want to add up to about 1/3 cup (33 grams) more almond flour. I did this once and the cookies were still sweet enough and worked perfectly.

Sugar sub?

While I don’t normally use granulated sugar in my recipes, these Italian almond cookies are worth it! As for whether other sweeteners would work, I’m not sure as I haven’t tried them.

I haven’t tried this recipe with coconut sugar for a paleo version because I was assuming that the darker taste of the coconut sugar would overpower the almond flavor. If you try it out, I’d love to hear how it goes!

Lemon variation

I’ve tried these cookies with and without almond extract and highly recommend using the extract. But if you don’t have any on hand, you could turn these into Italian lemon cookies! Just add 2 tablespoons of lemon zest and lemon extract in place of the almond extract.

And for more zingy lemon cookie fun, give these lemon sugar cookies a try!

If you give these cookies a try, I’d love any feedback you may have! Thank you. 🙂 For another Christmas treat, try these allergy-friendly roll-out sugar cookies! These pizzelle cookies also look amazing.

5 from 52 votes