Vegan Cinnamon Rolls

Nothing is cozier or more welcoming than a warm, gooey, homemade vegan cinnamon roll for breakfast. This is a beginner-friendly recipe that bakers with limited experience can tackle! We have outlined lengthy tips and techniques for making vegan cinnamon rolls that shine.

A stand mixer is recommended. An overnight sleep in the fridge breaks up the rise time. The easy, no-fuss icing is delectable. Let’s go bake!

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Basic Ingredients For Vegan Cinnamon Rolls

This recipe uses mostly pantry ingredients plus vegan butter. No flax eggs or vegan buttermilk or anything needy– simple ingredients that recreate regular cinnamon rolls.

Flour: We have tested this recipe numerous times with all-purpose and bread flour. Both work fabulously. If using bread flour, more milk is required so see notes in the recipe card.

Milk: We use our homemade coconut-cashew milk for 99% of everything we make! This recipe works well with pretty much every non-dairy milk we tested. Avoid coconut milk in the can (or see recipe notes to dilute it) and avoid rice milk and hemp milk due to consistency and flavor.

Sugar: This recipe calls for sugar. In 3 forms if you’re making the icing. But who’s counting? Cane/white sugar in the dough, brown sugar in the filling, and powdered sugar in the icing.

Oil: You can skip this if you don’t have it, but it assists in softening the dough! Use a neutral flavored oil like avocado, canola, or even a very light-colored extra virgin olive oil.

Yeast: The yeast in those standard packets works perfectly! 2.25 teaspoons is the amount of yeast inside of 1 packet. ActiveDry or Instant Yeast both work. We do not recommend RapidRise yeast.

Cinnamon: It’s a must! This is what warm, cozy flavors are made of.

Method For Vegan Cinnamon Rolls

First off, important details. This recipe yields 12 cinnamon rolls and fits into a 9×13″ baking pan. If you alter the number of cinnamon rolls or the size of the pan the bake time and final result will change. A stand mixer is recommended– we haven’t tested making this dough by kneading it by hand.

The following are the basic steps- the in-depth process is below in the recipe card.

Make the dough: Activate the yeast in warm sugared milk then add dry ingredients and knead in the butter.

Rise the dough: Cover the dough and rise until doubled in size. This is either an overnight rest in the fridge (preferred method) or 1.5-2 hours at room temperature. Regardless of the method, you’ll need to work with chilled dough to shape it so after the rise, it’ll need to go back in the fridge for at least 2 hours.

Shape the dough into rolls: This is easiest with chilled dough. Punch down the dough and flatten it into an even rectangle. Use a dough scraper or your hands- your preference.

• Roll the rectangle out into a roughly 12×18″ rectangle.
• Spread the softened butter and filling mixture evenly across the rectangle, leaving a 1″ border along one of the 12″ sides. (This will help the dough stick to itself and form a seal when you roll it up)
• Roll it up into a long, cinnamony log! Start the roll at the 12″ side WITH the filling. As you begin, you’ll need to sort of tuck and pinch to get going, then it will easily roll.
• Once the log is all rolled up, gently pinch the edge/seam to help it stick together, then roll the log so the seam is on the bottom.
• Cut this into 12 equally sized pieces. The log usually gets longer as you roll and the far ends are misshapen and excess- use a knife to cut 1-3″ off each end. I bake these in a separate little pan and my toddler loves them =] Or you can toss them. You should be left with about a 12″ uniform log to slice.

Leave the rolls to rise: Place the rolls evenly spaced in a 13×9″ baking dish. I always line it with parchment paper for easy removal. Cover the rolls with a thin kitchen towel or plastic wrap and set aside to rise- for 30-60 minutes. You should visibly see that the rolls have ‘poofed’ a bit and if you do a finger poke there should be a little indent.

Bake: Bake in a pre-heated 350* oven until your desired level of done. For very squishy, soft rolls you can remove them when there is just a whisper of golden brown on the edges of the border rolls. Our household prefers them when all the rolls have a decent amount of golden brown.

Make the icing: Mix up the quick vanilla icing. You can ice the rolls fresh out of the oven for ultra-soft and gooey rolls or leave them to cool for 10 minutes before icing. We like to bake our rolls until the entire surface is lightly golden, then ice immediately. It’s a divine texture!

Tips On Rolling Out The Dough

#1 Lightly dust your work surface with flour before rolling it out, and flip the rectangle dough flat so there is a very light sprinkle of flour on each side. These flour dredgers are great for a very light flour cover.

#2 To get a nice rectangle shape, begin with a rectangle shape. Most bowls are round, thus when dough proofs then is tipped out and punched down will create a disc (circular) shape. Punch down the dough then use your hands or a bench scraper to guide it into a rough rectangle before you begin to roll.

#3 Once you are getting a large rectangle size but aren’t quite at that 12×18 mark, gently lift each end of the dough up. This gives you a feel for how sticky the dough is and see if the dough is sticking to the counter. If you are working with properly chilled dough there shouldn’t be an issue.

#4 Get your filling mixed and ready before beginning to roll out the dough. (Helps save time and keep the dough cold)

Tips On Cutting

#1 The ends get a bit elongated and messy as you roll, depending on how neatly you roll and how chilled your dough is. Cut off those wonky end sections and bake them in a separate pan for your kids to eat!

#2 Use a ruler, small kitchen measuring tape, or a bench scraper with measurements to measure your trimmed log and divide the length by 12″. Ideally the log is 12″ and you’ll measure 1″ per roll. Make a little indent in the dough every inch to indicate where your cuts will be… This is all perfectionist talk, you absolutely do not need to do this!

#3 There are 3 methods commonly used for cutting cinnamon rolls– a knife, dental floss, or scissors. I have tried all 3 and prefer dental floss! Take a piece of dental floss and slide it under the dough log until it lines up with your first cut indent. Pull the floss up and over to cut and repeat.

#4 If your dough felt sticky as you were rolling up the log, place the rolled log into the fridge for about 15 minutes before cutting the rolls. This little chill time will firm up the dough again.

#5 If you place the rolls ‘cut side up’ in the pan, they’ll have a prettier and more defined swirl. ‘Cut side up’ meaning the last or most recent side they were cut on (because all the center pieces will have been cut on both ends).

Again, this is all extra, over-the-top cinnamon roll obsession talk.

Tips On Baking & Checking Doneness

After a brief second rise, aka the rest after placing the cut rolls in the pan to poof up, it’s time to bake! Place your oven rack in the center position and preheat to 350*.

For very soft, squishy rolls: Look for golden brown edges around the perimeter of the pan. The innermost rolls will likely still be a little doughy in the center; some people prefer this. Wait for 10ish minutes before icing and let the rolls continue carryover cooking. (this is about 190* internal temp)

For soft, slightly chewy rolls: Look for a light golden brown exterior on all rolls. This gets your center rolls a bit more done and less doughy. Wait 10ish minutes before icing. (this is about 195* internal temp)

For chewy, ooey gooey rolls: Look for all rolls to be pretty evenly browned. You may fret that you have gone too far but here’s the trick. Remove the rolls and immediately drizzle some of the icing on them, especially the corner and far perimeter edge ends. The hot rolls will absorb all that sweet icing and become soooooo deliciously gooey and soften up while still keeping their chewy bite. Heaven! (this is about 200-205* internal temp)

If temping the rolls, be sure to stick the probe straight down into a dough section, and not the hot bubbly sugar mixture. I like to aim for the center of the roll as there is a nice bit of dough there.

Vegan Cinnamon Rolls FAQs

Can I use other types of flour? We have extensively tested this recipe with both all-purpose flour and bread flour so those are the only 2 flours we can recommend. Bread flour creates a chewier, heftier cinnamon roll that we love!

The dough feels too sticky, should I add more flour? Refer to the video for checking the stickiness of the dough. Cinnamon roll dough is an enriched dough so it is going to feel stickier than a lean dough (like pizza dough). The butter will firm up in the fridge and when it does the dough is so lovely to work with!

My brown sugar isn’t ‘light’ or ‘dark’, which is it? If a bag of brown sugar doesn’t specify, it’s likely ‘light brown sugar’. Dark brown sugar will always be labeled as such. Dark brown sugar has far more deep caramel, molasses, and toffee notes so it tastes amazing in cinnamon rolls. It is also a darker color, making the swirl have a higher contrast to the light-colored dough.

How to roll dough into a rectangle? I struggled with this for umm, far too long when I started baking =] The best way to roll dough into a rectangle is to start with a rectangle! I used to always punch down my dough into a circle (‘disc’ shape) and try to roll it into a rectangle without much fuss. There was ALWAYS fuss. Start with a flat, even rectangle, and the rolling process will be immensely easier!

What if I overbaked my cinnamon rolls? There is a very easy fix for this! If you overbaked your cinnamon rolls and have hard edges and corners, drizzle the icing over the cinnamon rolls immediately after removing from the oven, tent the rolls with aluminum foil, and return them to the warm oven (turned off, just residual heat from baking) for 3-5 minutes. The rolls will soften thanks to the icing melting into them and fluff up and become SUPER gooey and delicious!

Recommended Tools For Vegan Baking Success

You don’t need any of this to get started in vegan baking! However, if you’ve gotten your hands wet and enjoy baking homemade goods, these are by far my favorite and most-used tools!

Kitchen measuring tape: As you get more into baking, many recipes will call for a specific size to roll your dough to. (ie 12″x16″) This is a cheap and glorious tool that’s always dusted in flour and dough in my kitchen drawer because I use it all the time.

Kitchen scale: This helps with precision if you’re encountering trouble in your bakes. I don’t always use a scale for every ingredient, but I have a system. As you keep baking you’ll find a system that works for you and for many bakers- a great system is a scale!

Large storage bowl with lid: Many of our recipes utilize an overnight rise in the fridge. If you have a container with a lid you don’t have to worry about oiling a pan and wrapping it with a towel or plastic wrap. I plop the dough in the larger of these two containers (either one), put the lid on, and in the fridge it goes.

Light-colored metal pans: For years and years I only had a hodgepodge of thrifted, gifted, or passed-down bakeware. (I mostly still do, slowly building it up) For foolproof baking, light-colored metal pans are the way to go! They bake evenly and slowly with even heat distribution. Dark metal pans or glass pans can cause goods to bake very unevenly- they have a high heat transfer capability. This means the edges will bake up fast and may become too dark before the center can fully bake. Burnt edges and doughy centers are no good.

An oven-safe thermometer: These are great when you are making a recipe that you haven’t made many times before or trying to conquer a new bake! The certainty of a thermometer read is excellent peace of mind.

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