Vegan Vanilla Frosting (2024)

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By Carine Claudepierre
Published on 09/16/2020 - Last updated on 03/15/2024

4.90 from 47 votes

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This vegan vanilla frosting is an easy vegan frosting for cakes or cupcakes. It’s a creamy vegan buttercream frosting with only 4 ingredients, and it’s 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.

Ingredients and Substitutions

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.

How To Make Vegan Vanilla Frosting

It takes only 10 minutes to make a vegan vanilla buttercream frosting.

All you need is your soft vegan butter spread to become smooth and whiter in color (photo 1). 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.
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 (photo 2). 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

Why has my buttercream failed?

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.

How Can I fix A Too-Thin 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.

How Can I Fix An Overly Thick Frosting?

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.

My frosting is too grainy, how can I fix it?

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.

My frosting is too sweet, what can I do?

Baking Recipes To Use Vegan Frosting

You can use this vegan frosting on my vegan chocolate cake, vegan cupcakes, or muffins recipes below.

Vegan Vanilla Cupcakes

Vegan Carrot Cake Cupcakes

Vegan Strawberry Muffins

Crazy Chocolate Cake

More Dairy-Free Frosting Recipes

If you like vegan frosting, you’ll love these other frosting recipes:

Vegan Chocolate Frosting Recipe

Coconut Cream Frosting

Cashew Frosting

Did You Like This Recipe?

Leave a comment below or head to our Facebook page for tips, our Instagram page for inspiration, our Pinterest for saving recipes, and Flipboard to get all the new ones!

Vegan Vanilla Frosting

An easy Vegan frosting with vanilla flavor, perfect for vegan cakes or vegan cupcakes.

4.90 from 47 votes

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Prep Time: 15 minutes mins

Total Time: 15 minutes mins

Course: Dessert

Cuisine: American

Servings: 6 cupcakes

Ingredients

US Customary – Metric

▢ ½ cup Softened 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 Plant-Based 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.

Notes

The nutrition panel is for 1 serving, the recipe makes enough frosting for 12 small cupcakes.

Equipment

Cuisinart Electric Beater

Measuring Cups and Spoons

Pin Recipe

Nutrition

About Carine

Hi, I'm Carine, the food blogger, author, recipe developer, photographer, and published author of a cookbook and founder of The Conscious Plant Kitchen with my husband Damien.Learn more about us.

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4.90 from 47 votes (42 ratings without comment)

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51 Comments

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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!
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- That sounds wonderful! I wish we had oat milk butter where I live.
  Reply
Can I substitute coconut extract in place of vanilla? I’m hoping to decorate with coconut flavour.
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- Absolutely
  Reply
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,
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What favouring can be used instead of Vanilla please. As my daughter is allegic to it.
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- Almond extract, rose extract or keep it plain, it will taste good as well.
  Reply
Hi! Is this recipe good for piping flowers?! Thank you!
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- I haven’t tried that yet!
  Reply
Hi! How well does this recipe hold up in the heat?
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- Like any frosting, they must be refrigerated or they turn bad. It will hold well at room temperature for a few hours.
  Reply
Do you know if I can turn this into chocolate icing by adding some cocoa powder with the icing sugar???
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- You can try my vegan chocolate frosting recipe instead.
  Reply
How long can my cupcakes stay out in room temp with this frosting? Thanks!
Reply
- I keep mine for a few days in a cake box.
  Reply
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.
Reply
- Yes it should work
  Reply
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! 🙂
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