This recipe for the perfect frosted vegan sugar cookies is soft, chewy, fluffy, and melt-in-your-mouth delicious!
The best vegan sugar cookie recipe
With no butter, no eggs, and no dairy required, people are always amazed at just how wonderful these buttery sugar cookies taste.
Plus, unlike many other vegan sugar cookie recipes, this one can be made with only basic cookie ingredients.
In fact, you may already have everything in your kitchen needed to make the chewy vegan cookies for dessert tonight.
And yes, the recipe totally works with cookie cutters!
Also try these Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies
Vegan Lofthouse sugar cookies
Have you ever tried a Lofthouse sugar cookie?
These soft homemade vegan sugar cookies are sure to remind you of the cake-like decorated sugar cookies you can find in the bakery section of your local grocery store.
They are perfect for Valentine’s Day dessert, festive Christmas cookie trays, birthday parties, holiday parties, or simply just because.
The recipe is also easy to customize.
I will often add a few drops of almond extract, coconut extract, pure peppermint extract, or maple extract for a fun flavor twist.
Or turn them into vegan chai cookies by stirring a sprinkle of cinnamon, cardamom, allspice, ginger, and ground cloves into the batter before adding the liquid ingredients.
You might also like this Vegan Cheesecake – No Cashews
Ingredients for vegan sugar cookies
The cookies require no flax eggs or chia eggs, just everyday sugar cookie ingredients.
To make the recipe, you will need flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, oil or dairy free butter, nondairy milk, and pure vanilla extract.
Flour – Tested flour options that work include white all purpose flour, oat flour, and whole grain spelt flour, which is my favorite. Do not use almond flour or coconut flour.
For dairy free and gluten free sugar cookies, use oat flour. I have not tried all purpose gluten free flour, so be sure to report back for other readers if you experiment.
If you prefer a grain free and paleo option, try these Keto Cookies.
Sugar – As a cost effective option, I often go with regular white sugar here. Another granulated sweetener can be substituted if you wish, including refined sugar free coconut sugar, date sugar, or a no sugar option like xylitol.
Pure maple syrup and agave are options I have not tried yet and therefore cannot recommend.
Butter – These sugar cookies can either be oil free or made without vegan butter. Even when using real sugar and vegan butter, they only have about 70 calories each.
The oil version, which uses melted coconut oil or vegetable oil, will have more of a crispy, shortbread texture, while the plantbased butter version is softer.
Both options are really good, so it is entirely your choice.
Vanilla – For the best taste, choose pure vanilla extract. In these cookies and with baking in general, I recommend avoiding imitation vanilla or artificial vanilla flavoring.
Milk – Finally, milk of choice refers to any vegan milk alternative. You may use oat milk, soy milk, cashew milk, coconut milk, almond milk, rice milk, or whatever you have in the refrigerator.
Trending Right Now: Vegan Brownies
Easy step by step recipe video
Above – Watch the vegan sugar cookie recipe video
How to make egg free sugar cookies
Step one is to get out a large mixing bowl. Add all dry ingredients to the bowl.
Mix these ingredients very well before adding the oil, milk, and vanilla extract. Stir everything together to form a sugar cookie dough.
The dough should look dry at first. Keep stirring, and it will achieve a cookie dough texture after about a minute of stirring. You can also use a stand mixer if you own one, or simply stir by hand.
Either smush the dough into one giant ball and then roll into cookie balls, or transfer the dough to a gallon sized bag and form a ball from inside the bag.
If you are not ready to bake right away, you can make the dough ahead of time and refrigerate covered overnight or for a few days.
When ready to bake cookies, preheat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.
Fold the Ziploc in half, then roll out the dough inside until it takes up the entirety of the other half of the bag.
Cut open the bag, and cut out shapes with cookie cutters or form into cookie shapes with your hands.
Place the sugar cookie shapes on a baking tray. Bake on the center rack of a properly calibrated oven for eleven minutes.
The cookies should look underdone when you remove them from the oven. Let the pan cool for at least ten minutes before handling the cookies, because they continue to firm up as they cool.
To prevent the frosting from melting, make sure the cookies are no longer hot before adding any icing, sprinkles, or other toppings.
Prefer chocolate cookies? Try these Chocolate Crinkle Cookies
Plant based sugar cookie frosting recipe
If you want to cut out the sugar cookies and add icing, feel free to use your favorite store bought or homemade buttercream or vanilla vegan frosting recipe.
Below is the vegan icing I used, adapted from my Easy Cinnamon Rolls.
Beat room temperature 8 oz packaged or homemade vegan cream cheese with 4 oz vegan butter spread, 2 cups powdered sugar, and 1 tsp pure vanilla extract.
Add a little milk of choice as needed.
Or for a healthier option, you can frost the sugar cookies with melted Coconut Butter and add sweetener of choice as desired or even mashed banana.
I opted to garnish the finished cookies with rainbow sprinkles for presentation.
(Note: the cookies can also be rolled into balls an flattened a little before baking if you want thicker cookies instead of cut outs.)
*Here’s a similar recipe for Vegan Snickerdoodles
Vegan Sugar Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups flour (spelt, white, or oat flour) Or make these Keto Cookies
- 3/4 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup sugar (unrefined if desired)
- 6 tbsp oil or melted vegan butter
- 1 1/2 tbsp milk of choice
- 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
Instructions
- *If you want to frost the cookies, feel free to use your favorite icing. The frosting recipe I used is written out earlier in this post. And if you’re a visual person, be sure to watch the video above that shows how to make the cookies!Combine dry ingredients in a bowl. Stir in remaining ingredients to form a dough. It will be dry at first but should turn into cookie dough within a minute of stirring. Either smush dough into a big ball and then roll into cookie balls, or transfer to a gallon-sized ziploc and smush into a ball from inside the bag. If desired, you can refrigerate the dough overnight or even for a few days. When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 325 F. Fold the bag in half, then roll the dough out from inside the bag until it takes up the one half of the bag (as shown in the third photo in this post). Cut open the bag, cut out shapes, and place on a baking tray. Bake 11 minutes. They’ll look a little underdone, so let them cool and do not touch them for at least 10 minutes. Be sure the cookies are completely cooled before frosting them, or the frosting will melt.View Nutrition Facts
Video
Notes
More Holiday Vegan Cookies
Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Now a time vegan recipe is most popular with changing the alarming climate change. I appreciate your great writing. thanks for share.
Easy to make and delicious
Hi Katie! I would like to use your Vegan Sugar Cookie recipe to make cookies for my son’s class (we are in Sweden and schools are still open) for the end of the school year. The kids have multiple allergies, so I need to make the cookies gluten egg and dairy free. Vegan is great too. I see that it calls for vegan butter. Can regular margarine be substituted for that (we don’t have many vegan butter options here)? Also, would a regular gluten free flour work? Last, how have you found the recipe works with oat milk (Oatley for example). Sorry for all the questions! Thanks for your help. Kind regards, Kristen Andersson
Oat milk is fine, as is margarine. The only gf flour that’s been tested has been oat flour (if you use certified gf then oat flour is gf), so unfortunately there’s no way to know what the results would be using another gf flour without trying it, but be sure to report back if you experiment!
Jason
These turned out fantastic and the taste was excellent. Didn’t even make it to frosting because they ate them so fast. Whole family loved them. Will definitely make again.
My family loved them too! The kids of course, but also my husband 😂
For the sugar should it be Liquid or just regular granulated? I have the option between honey, swerve, brown, and white sugar. Also for the oil does melted coconut oil work?
Hi, use granulated sugar (such as regular white sugar or evaporated cane sugar for unrefined). Melted coconut oil works; just make sure the rest of your ingredients aren’t cold when you add the oil.
The cookies are pretty good however it took me a while to get to a workable consistency.It was VERY crumbly dough , I managed to cut out some out and they were very tasty !
Mine are very crumbly also. I can’t use it. What did you do to get It to a workable dough?
I tried this recipe and the cookies turned out well! However there are two things to note for future bakers: I suggest baking the cookies for longer than 11 minutes. I found that this is not long enough and although the recipe says to take them out even when they look a bit underdone, they came out too floppy. So I suggest baking them for a couple minutes longer and monitoring their colour at the bottom to make sure they aren’t too soft and have more structure (Unless you like soft and flimsy cookies).
Second, for those who refrigerate their dough for a few days, I suggest warming up the dough in your hands for a bit to make it less hard and more pliable. Once you work with the dough for a bit you will find it to be very easy to roll out.
Overall great recipe and I will definitely try it again but just bake them a bit longer.
Hi! Thank you so much these turned out amazing! I baked them for exactly 11 minutes and they turned out perfect 🙂
amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you have to do this
Hello! Very excited to try out your recipe! My daughter is allergic to dairy and nuts, so she was so excited to hear I found a cookie cutout recipe she can enjoy!
I was wondering if you have ever tried turning these cookies into chocolate sugar cookies? Any suggestions on how much cocoa powder and/or how to modify the flour ratio?
Thank you!
Hmm maybe replace 1/4 cup of the flour with cocoa and try that? If you experiment before we do, definitely let us know how it goes!