Easy Vegan Vanilla Frosting | ICanYouCanVegan ICanYouCanVegan Vanilla Frosting Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is vegan frosting made of? ›

Mine is made one of a few ways: a stick of earth balance 'butter', half a tub of vegan cream cheese (Trader Joe's or Tofutti are my preference), powdered sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla and a tablespoon or so of plant milk.

Other smooth ingredients that you can add to amp up a canned frosting are peanut butter (or any nut butter of your choosing), fruit preserves or jam, nutella, marshmallow creme, cookie butter, or a citrus curd. You'll need anywhere from ½ cup to 1 cup for one (16-ounce) tub of frosting.

Spreadable margarine tend to have a higher water content which can make the frosting too runny. Also, ensure the butter, sugar and vanilla are mixed thoroughly before adding any soy milk. Add the soy milk 1 teaspoon at a time and mix thoroughly before adding more.

Always begin by scraping the frosting into a mixing bowl and stirring vigorously or mixing with a mixer until smooth and creamy. This simple step of incorporating air into a can of dense store-bought frosting will make it fluffy and enhance the flavor.

Vegan Butter: I like to use Country Crock Plant Butter, it needs to be room temperature. Vegetable Shortening: This is very necessary. While normal buttercream is just made with butter, vegan butter doesn't hold up and needs this extra ingredient. Powdered Sugar: Most organic powdered sugar is vegan.

The simple answer is no, most standard frosting (whipped, buttercream or otherwise) is not vegan. This is because standard frosting ingredients include milk, butter or eggs. However with the right mix of a vegan, non-dairy milk substitute and powdered sugar, voila!

The starch added to most powdered sugar can make frosting taste slightly metallic. Here's how to fix that: Melt the butter and mix it with the powdered sugar, salt, and milk in a stainless steel bowl. Set the bowl in a wide skillet of barely simmering water for 5 minutes, stirring from time to time.

To thicken vegan icing, you can use a combination of maple syrup, coconut cream and cornstarch. Start by adding 1/4 cup of cornstarch to 1/4 cup of maple syrup in a small pot on medium heat. Stir until it becomes a thick paste and then add in 1/2 cup of coconut cream.

How do you keep vegan frosting from melting? ›

If you're not adding enough sugar, your buttercream won't be stable enough to hold its shape for long. If you're adding a little plant-based milk to thin the buttercream when frosting a cake, you might be adding too much of it, again, making it too unstable.

Try thickening it with a bit of heavy whipping cream. You can add up to ¼ cup of heavy cream, depending on how much you need to thicken it. Then whip the frosting until it fluffs up.

Whip it until fluffy: To make frosting fluffy, it needs to be aerated. Add the container of frosting into a bowl and use a hand mixer or stand mixer with the whisk attachment to whip it for 3 minutes.

You'll be glad to know there is a distinction between the two. In broad terms, frosting is thick and fluffy, and is used to coat the outside (and often the inner layers) of a cake. Icing is thinner and glossier than frosting, and can be used as a glaze or for detailed decorating.

It is technically possible to make frosting with canned whipped cream and unflavored gelatin, but the results may not be ideal. Firstly, canned whipped cream tends to be less stable and have a lower fat content compared to homemade whipped cream. This can make it more difficult to achieve a fluffy and stable frosting.

So, sucanat, turbinado, coconut sugar, and demurara are all vegan sugars.

Beat confectioners' sugar and dairy-free margarine together using an electric mixer on low speed. Add water to increase creaminess if needed. Add vanilla. Increase speed to high and continue to mix until frosting is stiff.

There is one exception to this, though - icing sugar. It doesn't use bone char but some of the most popular brands of icing sugar contain dried egg white. It's a bit more of a pain to find a vegan option here, although if you search for “vegan icing sugar”, you can find brands that sell online.

Pillsbury Frosting?!

Many of the Pillsbury frostings–even the cream cheese and milk chocolate varieties–are vegan! (They do contain partially-hydrogenated oils, but hey, no one eats cupcakes to be healthy.)