Vegan Royal Icing Recipe (2024)

This easy 3-ingredient Vegan Royal Icing recipe for piping onto cookies or pound cakes adds a delicious white, sweet glaze to food.

Bonus, this vegan icing recipe is not only egg-free but also gluten-free.

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Royal icing is the best part of baking. It’s an alternative to my Protein Powder Frosting or Vegan Chocolate Frosting. It’s sweet with a pure white shiny color that makes any vegan cake, vegan muffin, or vegan cookie beautiful.

Here I am sharing my tips to make a simple royal icing without meringue powder and minimal ingredients.

Is Royal Icing Vegan?

No, the classic royal icing recipe is made of meringue powder, a ready-made mix of cornstarch and dried egg white.

How To Make Vegan Royal Icing

It’s so easy to make a vegan royal icing at home, using some of your most basic pantry ingredients. Then there are two ways to make the icing.

• Icing to glaze cakes and pound cakes – this is the runnier version.
• Icing for piping onto cookies – this is a thicker version.

Below I will share all my tips to create the best vegan icing for cookies or cakes.

Ingredients

To make both versions of this egg-free royal icing, you need 3-ingredients:

• Icing sugar that’s the regular powder sugar you also use for vegan frosting.
• Vanilla extract – this is optional, only for flavor. You can also use lemon juice instead.
• Gel food coloring drops – optional too, but if you want to add color to your icing, use gel food coloring instead of liquid food coloring that dilutes icing.
• Soy cream – this acts as an egg replacer in the recipe. Soy cream, like Alpro, contains added gums that make the royal icing thicker than regular almond milk. While some plant-based milk also contains gums, they don’t contain much of it, or most of the time don’t have any, and they don’t make icing thick as soy cream.

Mix ingredients

To make your vegan royal icing, stir the icing sugar, soy cream, and vanilla extract together until a thick white icing forms.

If the icing is too runny, add more powder sugar. If too thick, thin out with more soy cream.

Add some color

This is optional, but icing colors are fun! To make different colors, you can split the batch of this vegan royal icing recipe into small bowls and add 3-4 drops of gel food coloring.

Stir to combine, and if the coloring makes the icing too liquid, add a pinch more icing sugar to balance and reach the right texture.

Option 1: Drizzling On Top Of Cakes Or Muffins

You can use this royal icing immediately if you simply want to drizzle on top of muffins, as I do on my pumpkin banana muffin or vegan lemon pound cake, using a spoon.

The icing is slightly runny and perfect if used at room temperature but too runny for a piping bag.

Option 2: Piping The Icing

If you want to use this royal icing in a piping bag to decorate my vegan gingerbread cookies, for example, then you must:

• Add 1/4cup more icing sugar.
• Refrigerate the batch of royal icing for 1 hour in a mixing bowl covered with plastic wrap, making sure the plastic touches the icing to prevent the top of the icing from forming a crust.

Then, fill a piping bag and use it to decorate:

• Vegan Gingerbread Cookies
• Gingerbread House
• Lemon Almond Flour Cookies
• Shortbread Cookies
• Oat Flour Sugar Cookies
• 3-Ingredient Almond Flour Sugar Cookies

Frequently Asked Questions