Smooth & Creamy Keto Pumpkin Spice Latte

Three tall glasses of caramel-colored iced latte under whipped cream and cinnamon, on dark blue with red blooms and scattered coffee beans Save to Pinterest
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Introduction

Pumpkin spice season arrives whether you asked for it or not, and the drink at the center of it is one of the harder ones to work around on keto — a store-bought pumpkin spice latte is built on sweetened syrup and milk.

This is the iced version, made at home, and it gets there a different way: a ready-to-drink caramel protein shake for the body, cold brew for the coffee, real pumpkin purée, and the spices measured rather than pre-mixed into a syrup. It takes about as long as waiting in line would.

Keto Pumpkin Iced Latte

Prep Time
5 minutes
Total Time
5 minutes
Yield
2 servings
Course
Drink
Cuisine
American
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Ingredients

All Ingredients

Nutrition Facts

2 servings per recipe
Trans Fat 0g 0% 0g 0%
Total Sugars — —
Allulose 0g 0% 0g 0%

Where you see an em dash: one of the ingredients in this recipe does not publish a figure for that row, so we cannot add one up honestly. We would rather show you nothing there than a zero we cannot stand behind.

About these numbers: We are home cooks, not certified nutritionists. Nutrition is shared as a courtesy. We pick a representative product for each ingredient, and our recipe system works out the totals from the amounts in this recipe, so please treat them as a helpful estimate rather than a guarantee. The brands you buy, any swaps you make, and how generously you portion the recipe will all move these numbers.

Directions

  1. Fill two serving glasses with ice and set them aside.

    The drink is mixed in one glass and poured over that ice at the end, so the glass you mix in needs to be a large one — it has to hold about 15 fl oz of liquid.

  2. Spoon the pumpkin puree into the mixing glass and stir it smooth.

    Break the lumps up now, while there is nothing on top of it. Once 15 fl oz of liquid goes in, the lumps are much harder to chase down.

  3. Add the protein shake, sweetener, cinnamon and nutmeg.

    Into the same mixing glass, on top of the puree.

  5. Add the cold coffee and stir until smooth.

    Use a stirrer or a long spoon, or a milk frother if you want it frothy, and work it until the color is even with no streaks of puree left. Taste it and adjust the sweetness now, while it is undiluted.

  6. Pour it over the two glasses of ice.

    Top each one with whipped cream and a sprinkle of ground cinnamon, if you like.

Notes

Preparation

This is stirred in the glass rather than blended, which keeps the cleanup to one spoon. A few things help:

  • Chill the pumpkin puree before you use it. It goes into the glass first and everything else is cold, so a room-temperature puree is the one thing that will take the edge off.
  • A milk frother is the easiest way to get it properly combined, but a long spoon works — start slowly so the puree does not climb the sides of the glass.
  • If you find your keto pumpkin spice latte to be too thick, you can thin it out by adding a bit more cold coffee. If it’s the opposite, where it’s too thin, use a little less cold brew next time — this recipe is built on a ready-to-drink shake rather than a powder, so there is nothing dry to thicken it with.
  • For something creamier, a splash of heavy cream stirred in at the end does it without changing the balance much. Go carefully: the drink is 15 fl oz split two ways, so half a cup added to it is about a fifth of the finished drink, and it dilutes the coffee and spice along with everything else.
  • The spices are the safe thing to play with: ground ginger and cloves alongside the cinnamon and nutmeg get you closer to a full pumpkin pie spice. A vanilla shake in place of the caramel works on the same logic, since you are swapping one flavored 11 fl oz shake for another.
  • The shake is structural, not a flavoring. It is 11 fl oz of the 15 and it carries the sweetness, the body and the caramel all at once. Swapping it for milk plus a syrup matches the volume and nothing else, and the drink is written around it.

Storage

This is made to be drunk straight away, over the ice you poured it onto. For anything left over:

  • Refrigerate it promptly in a covered container — a serving glass with a lid does the job.
  • Use it within a day or two.
  • Stir it before you drink it. Pumpkin puree is suspended in the liquid rather than dissolved in it, so it settles out as the glass stands.

Serving Suggestions

  • Ten or fifteen minutes in the freezer before the ice goes in gets the serving glasses cold, and a cold glass melts the ice more slowly than a room-temperature one does.
  • Add the whipped cream just before serving, and put a straw or long spoon in the glass so it can be stirred in as you drink.
  • Beyond the whipped cream and cinnamon, a cinnamon stick, a dusting of cocoa powder or a drizzle of sugar-free caramel sauce all suit it.
  • It is sweet and filling enough to stand on its own, which is mostly what the protein shake is doing. If you want something alongside it, the pumpkin spice mug cake runs on the same spices.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which caramel proteins should I use?

The recipe is built on 11 fl oz of a ready-to-drink caramel protein shake. That liquid is the body of the drink rather than a flavoring, so the useful answer is to use a bottled shake at roughly that volume — the brand matters much less than the format does.

The products below are kept here as flavor references, and they are powders, not bottled shakes, so none of them is a drop-in for the 11 fl oz this recipe is built on. Using one means deciding the water, the powder quantity and the resulting sweetness yourself, and that is a reformulation rather than a substitution — there are no amounts for it here:

Isopure Vanilla Salted Caramel, Zero Carb
Quest Nutrition Salted Caramel
Perfect Keto Salted Caramel

Is pumpkin spice latte keto?

A coffee-shop one is not, and the reason is usually the syrup rather than the pumpkin. Pumpkin spice sauce is mostly sugar, and it goes in before the milk does — so the carbs are in the base of the drink, not something you can order around.

This version gets its sweetness from monk fruit sweetener and its body from a ready-to-drink protein shake instead of milk. Real pumpkin puree does the pumpkin part; a quarter cup of it carries the flavor without carrying much sugar, because puree is nothing but squash.

The per-glass numbers are in the Nutrition Facts panel with the recipe.

Can I use pumpkin pie filling instead of pumpkin puree?

No. Canned pumpkin puree is just pumpkin (pure pumpkin, no pun intended), with no sugar added. Pumpkin pie filling is sweetened and already spiced, so it brings in exactly the sugar this drink is built to leave out. The two cans often sit side by side on the shelf, so check the label before you buy.

I don't like coffee. Can I replace it with something else?

The coffee is 4 fl oz of the 15, so taking it out leaves the drink mostly shake and pumpkin — sweeter and thicker, without the bitterness that currently balances it.

The recipe has no coffee-free version. If you want to try it, the useful thing to know is that the coffee is doing two jobs at once, so removing it is two adjustments rather than one: you need something to make up the missing volume, and you will want less than the three teaspoons of sweetener here, because the coffee was offsetting some of it.

Matcha or chai in place of the coffee is a different drink rather than this one adjusted, and there are no amounts for either here.

Can I use pumpkin spice mix instead of individual spices?

Yes. The recipe uses ¼ teaspoon of cinnamon and ⅛ teaspoon of nutmeg, so about ⅜ of a teaspoon of pumpkin spice mix lands in the same place — call it a generous ⅓ teaspoon.

What you give up is control. Most blends carry ginger, cloves and allspice alongside the cinnamon and nutmeg, and the proportions vary by brand, so the drink will taste a little different from one jar to the next. That is a fair trade if you already have a blend open.

Can I make a hot version of this latte?

Not by swapping the coffee, no — and it is worth saying why, because it sounds like it should work.

The drink is 15 fl oz, and only 4 of those are coffee. The other 11 are refrigerated protein shake straight from the fridge. Pouring hot coffee into three times its volume of cold liquid gives you a lukewarm latte, not a hot one.

This one is formulated as an iced latte. A hot version would need a different method, and this recipe does not give one.

Wrap Up

Drink it while the ice is still mostly ice; it is made to be poured and drunk, not made ahead. The per-glass numbers are in the Nutrition Facts panel.

If you want more of the same spices without the coffee, the pumpkin spice mug cake takes about two minutes, and the rest of our keto pumpkin recipes are on one page.

Please rate the recipe below and tell us how it went in the comments — and the hashtag is #buttertogetherkitchen if you post a photo of yours.

Correction — October 2, 2026: This latte is made to be poured over ice and drunk straight away, not made the night before.