Vegan Vanilla Frosting
By Carine Claudepierre
Published on 09/16/2020 - Last updated on 11/22/2023
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This vegan vanilla frosting is an easy vegan frosting for cakes or cupcakes.
A creamy vegan buttercream frosting with only 4 ingredients, 100% dairy-free.
What’s Vegan Frosting?
This vegan frosting is smooth, creamy frosting to spread on top of cakes, cupcakes, muffins, and cookies to give them a delicious vanilla-flavored accent.
It’s made with only 4 plant-based ingredients and ready in 10 minutes.
How To Make Vegan Vanilla Frosting
It takes only 10 minutes to make a vegan vanilla buttercream frosting.
Frosting ingredients
First, gather all your ingredients. All you need are 4 ingredients:
- Soft vegan butter – most vegan butter brands, I recommend Earth Balance Vegan Butter Spread. This spread is already soft and spreadable out of the fridge. It means you don’t have to bring the vegan butter to room temperature before starting this easy vegan vanilla frosting recipe. You can’t use coconut oil for this recipe.
- Powdered sugar – also called icing sugar in some countries. You can’t make buttercream with crystal sugar. It must be powder sugar.
- Vanilla extract – or fresh vanilla seeds if preferred, but much more expensive.
- Unsweetened soy milk – or other non-dairy milk like almond milk or oat milk.
Beating The Vegan Butter
All you need is your soft vegan butter spread to become smooth and whiter in color. It shouldn’t take more than 30 seconds.
In fact, over-beating vegan butter can warm up the butter. Consequently, the vegan buttercream can become grainy or curdle.
Beating The Frosting
Then, add the rest of the ingredients with the soft creamed vegan butter, with only half of the non-dairy milk first, and beat with an electric hand mixer.
That’s the simplest way of making the frosting.
How To Use Vegan Vanilla Frosting
This is a vegan vanilla cake frosting that can be used to frost:
- One layer 8 to 9-inch vegan vanilla cake
- One batch of 12 vanilla cupcakes
This recipe uses only 1/2 cup of vegan butter to frost a two-layer cake or 24 cupcakes. Simply double up each ingredient in the recipe.
Frequently Asked Questions
There are a few reasons why your vegan vanilla cupcake frosting can fail.
Let me explain the reasons below, or jump to the next section for my troubleshooting tips.
1. Over-beating the ingredients – you beat the frosting too fast for too long.
2. Warm environment or ingredients – you must use vegan butter straight from the fridge.
3. Too much soy milk – adding too much soy milk or any dairy milk curdle frosting.
4. Old batch of powdered sugar – poorly stored powdered sugar forms lumps and crystals that you can feel in your buttercream.
5. Too sweet – you added too much powdered sugar to balance a runny frosting.
This happens if you add too much liquid.
Balance by adding an extra 1-2 teaspoons of cornstarch (to avoid raising the sweetness of the frosting) or powdered sugar if you don’t mind your frosting being too sweet.
Your frosting misses some liquid. Add more liquid, add drops like 1/4 teaspoon at a time to avoid the frosting turning runny too quickly.
Your powdered sugar contains lumps, or it’s an old batch stored in an open-air environment. If your icing sugar is not fine enough or presents a lump, sift the powdered sugar in the bowl to remove lumps/sugar blocks.
Stir in a pinch of salt to balance the sweetness, about 1/4 teaspoon salt.
This happens when your kitchen is too warm, or the butter is too warm.
Place the bowl in the fridge for 10 minutes and restart the beating steps. By bringing down the temperature, the fluffiness should come back.
Yes, you can color your vegan frosting using natural food coloring paste or gel. Don’t use liquid food coloring in the frosting recipe. It can curdle the frosting.
Baking Recipes To Use Vegan Frosting
You can use this vegan frosting on my vegan chocolate cake, vegan cupcakes, or muffins recipes below.
More Dairy-Free Frosting Recipes
If you like vegan frosting, you’ll love these other frosting recipes:
Did You Like This Recipe?
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Vegan Vanilla Frosting
Ingredients
- ½ cup Soft Vegan Butter (Unsalted) - Earth Balance's Soft Vegan Spread is the best
- 1 ½ cup Powdered Sugar - packed, leveled, scooped
- ½ teaspoon Vanilla Extract
- 1-2 tablespoons Non-Dairy Milk - soy milk or oat milk or almond milk
Instructions
- In a medium bowl, cream soft vegan butter with an electric hand mixer until smooth, fluffy and whiter in color – about 30 seconds.
- Add the powdered sugar, vanilla, and 1 tablespoon of soy milk.
- Beat on low speed with an electric hand mixer. This prevents the powdered sugar from bursting out of the bowl. Then, increase speed to medium-high speed moving around the bowl to bring all ingredients together.
- Beating until it forms a smooth, spreadable frosting, don't overbeat, or it could curdle or get grainy. Read my post above for all my troubleshooting tips.
- If frosting is too thick to your liking, beat in more milk, adding a few drops at a time. If frosting becomes too thin, beat in a small amount of extra powdered sugar.
Frosting
- This recipe frost 6 cupcakes or an 8 inch one-layer cake.
- Double the recipe for 12 cupcakes frosting or two-layer cake frosting.
Coloring
- You can add color to your frosting, adding food coloring paste or gel, not liquid!
Storage
- Store for up to one week in the fridge in a sealed container.
So tasty! I used Oatmilk butter and it melts pretty fast. I kept it refrigerated before serving, even in the freezer for half and hour and everyone couldn’t believe it was vegan!
That sounds wonderful! I wish we had oat milk butter where I live.
Can I substitute coconut extract in place of vanilla? I’m hoping to decorate with coconut flavour.
Absolutely
Amazing frosting recipe!
I only had salted vegan butter on hand so used that with an extra teaspoon of vanilla and the frosting was scrumptious! Thank you for this perfect recipe! I’ll never make another vanilla frosting other than this one,
What favouring can be used instead of Vanilla please. As my daughter is allegic to it.
Almond extract, rose extract or keep it plain, it will taste good as well.
Hi! Is this recipe good for piping flowers?! Thank you!
I haven’t tried that yet!
Hi! How well does this recipe hold up in the heat?
Like any frosting, they must be refrigerated or they turn bad. It will hold well at room temperature for a few hours.
Do you know if I can turn this into chocolate icing by adding some cocoa powder with the icing sugar???
You can try my vegan chocolate frosting recipe instead.
How long can my cupcakes stay out in room temp with this frosting? Thanks!
I keep mine for a few days in a cake box.
For the vegan strawberry icing, can you use a unsweetened strawberry syrup instead of the strawberry extract—don’t really like the natural flavors in most of the strawberry extracts.
Yes it should work
This is a lovely vegan vanilla frosting 🙂 I am glad I found it! I used it on my Gluten Free Vanilla Layer Cake. I added it in the middle of the two layers (like the Victorian Sponge cake) with some of my homemade raspberry jam, so the amount for 6 cupcakes was exactly right for what I needed. I have printed the recipe and will add your page to my favorites. Thank you for posting this recipe! 🙂
Do you know if this icing would freeze well? I need to make a large quantity of cupcakes ahead of time for an event.
I am pretty sure it will!
You said it stores up to a week and the. One of your follow up comments says 24-hours. How long can you store this in the fridge in an air tight container? Thanks!
You can store up to 1 week in the fridge. In the comment I meant you can store in a piping bag for 24 hour (or more!) and then decorate cupcakes.
Hi! I am a 14year old girl who LOVES to bake! I added this frosting to a chocolate chip cookie cake! This is the BEST frosting recipe ever. I have tried many and they all end up goopy and gross. This one was perfect! It was light and fluffy. Perfect for piping. I hope you continue to have success with making recipes. You are loved by God!
-Taylor
This review melted my heart and convinced me to save this recipe and give it a try.
If I wanted to add pureed strawberries in this frosting do you think it would be ok?
It will dilute the frosting, I would rather add crushed freeze dried strawberries – check my vegan strawberry cupcake recipe for tips on how to make a strawberry flavor frosting.
Thank you!
Delicious! The text before was also super helpful. The only thing is… On what planet does this make enough to ice 12 cupcakes? I struggled to ice 8 then scraped together my last 1/4c of powdered sugar to make another tiny batch and get enough to ice 2 more cupcakes lol. I’ll definitely double the recipe next time. But it was so good and everyone loved them.
Yes, this recipe is for 6 cupcakes and you need to double up the recipe if you are making 12 cupcakes. The post has been updated to make things clearer. Thanks for trying the recipe
I’m icing my sons birthday cake . And I’m using a mirror glaze on top which requires me to freeze the frosting once it’s applied for 1 hour to harden so that it can accept the 90degree mirror glaze. Will this recipee work better then your coconut frosting recipee?
Also can I use a bacel vegan margarine? It’s slightly salted but I’ve heard that if you don’t want the frosting to be super sweet you can fit that with some salt. Is this true?
I’m new to baking so excuse the silly questions !:)
I never made a mirror glaze before so i am not sure how it will pair with this frosting. Vegan margarine should work, but if salted except some salty flavor!
Could I make this frosting, use it to fill a piping bag, and store it in the fridge for later use?
Yes, it store very well up to 24 hours.
What do I add to make it chocolate?
Use my vegan chocolate frosting recipe instead
I’m going to try this! Looks easy enough, but what about temperature of the milk? Cold from the fridge? Or room temp?
Room temperature milk or straight out from the fridge, both works
Is there anyway I can reduce the powdered sugar amount as much as possible without losing the thickness needed of the icing for piping? If so, how much lower can the sugar be? Any changes to the other ingredients? Thanks again.
Reducing icing sugar will liquify the icing. I didn’t try using less so I can’t recommend but why don’t you try sugar-free powdered erythritol instead? It has no sugar, no carbs, no calories and it’s a natural diabetes friendly sweetener that will add the same thickness to your frosting
Hi
Is this frosting good for piping? Is it thick enough for that?
Thank you.
Absolutely perfect for it
I’ve haven’t tried it yet but how come we can’t use liquid food coloring?
Nobody said you can’t use food coloring, feel free to add few drops of liquid food coloring in the frosting if you love to.
This looks great! I need to bake my mini loaves or cupcakes (tbd) two days ahead – will the frosting keep shape after spreading if refrigerated? Or should I frost the day of?
Yes, it should last 2 days in the fridge without problem. Place the cupcakes in an airtight box to make sure the topping don’t dry out.
Thanks for sharing such a helpful and lovely recipe. Just wanted to know can we use date paste instead of sugar.
Will be waiting eagerly to hear from you.
TIA
You need a powder sweetener to make frosting or it won’t hold its shape. Date paste won’t work I am sorry
Big Thumbs Up! it was very quick and easy. it turned out exactly how i was expecting.
Your recipe specified to use a HAND mixer. If I don’t have one, will it matter, one way or another, if I use my STAND mixer? Thank you!
I love to use an electric hand mixer for small batch of frosting like for this recipe. My kitchen aid stand mixer attachment require a larger volume of ingredients to whip frosting evenly so depending on your stand mixer bowl size and attachment you may or not be able to whip this small frosting recipe. Enjoy,
You’re right about the problems of using a large mixer, still,adding a little more guarantee and mixing it by hand at the end I had a perfect frosting that covered two six inch layers. Made a cute vegan birthday cake for myself to share 😉