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Gingerbread cookies can be kinda dry, right? That’s why these juicy, perfect vegan gingerbread donuts are swooping right up to the table you keep near your chimney to upgrade Santa Claus’ basic cookie lifestyle to the upper echelons of Yuletide glory. What’s more, these are completely plant-based! And I carefully calibrated this recipe to work gloriously for you, whether you want to fry, bake, or air-fry these festive little bad babies.
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If you are a sucker for tender vegan gingerbread cake with vegan cream cheese frosting, this is like that but significantly easier to eat while dancing to horrendous Christmas music in an uncomfortable sweater at your office holiday party.
Does your family think plant-based baked goods suck? This vegan gingerbread donut recipe is like “hold my beer,” and makes them feel like the gosh darn goofs that they are. They will stand in awe of your ring-ding-ding-a-ling festive baking prowess while you wield a stocking full of coal around your head to launch at them with all the gusto that their nay-saying foolishness deserves.
This recipe turns you into Santa’s little baking elf. Real talk. Let’s get baking!
Jump to:
- 🥰 Why you’ll adore this gingerbread donut recipe
- 🫚 Vegan Gingerbread Donut Ingredients
- 🤯Variations
- Gear you need for this baking project
- 🍩 How to make vegan gingerbread donuts
- 🍩 Donut Cooking Methods
- 👉Top tips
- 🤷♀️ Recipe FAQs
- ✌️You'll love these other vegan donut recipes too
- Vegan Gingerbread Donuts (Baked, Fried, or Air-Fried)
🥰 Why you’ll adore this gingerbread donut recipe
🍩 This Recipe Gives You EVERYTHING: I have tested and armed you with instructions for a whopping FOUR ways of making these donuts! Baked, roll-and-cut fried, fried using a donut dropper (my fave), and air-fried too! You’ll have fresh, warm donuts ready in less than thirty minutes, no matter what equipment you have at your disposal!
🧑🍳 Crafted by an Award-Winning Donut Maker: Not to toot my own horn, but my vegan donut recipes have won awards, been featured in the New York Times, and on the Food Network, and have helped countless people make the transition to a completely vegan lifestyle. These aren't just some random crap that ChatGPT burped up...
✅ Vegan AF: Like all of my vegan Christmas recipes, these gingerbread donuts are made without animal products involved. Got doubts about that working out? My donuts have won awards against non-vegan competition, been featured on the front page of the New York Times Dining Section, and I have competed on a Food Network donut show. There’s a good reason why Gothamist called my food their favorite street food in NYC. It’s because my donuts don’t suck!
✅ Tested and Approved Worldwide: Like all of the vegan recipes I publish, this one has been shared with a team of hundreds of recipe testers who replicated it successfully in their home kitchens all around the globe.
🫚 Vegan Gingerbread Donut Ingredients
Vegan yogurt
Adding a little plant-based yogurt gives these donuts moisture and a little acidity that balances and cuts the sweetness, similar to how buttermilk performs. You can get away with substituting applesauce or pureed silken tofu with some lemon juice added to it.
As is with my vegan ricotta recipe, Turkish yogurt soup, vegan tikka masala, and other recipes that call for yogurt, my preference is for unflavored, unsweetened plant-based yogurt. My top recommendations are Kite Hill’s almond milk yogurt, Trader Joe’s cashew milk yogurt, or Forager’s cashew milk yogurt.
Molasses
Molasses is essential both for its depth of flavor, moisture, and the dark gingerbread color they give these donuts. If you don’t mind a lighter color, you can use maple syrup in its place. Whatever you do, this isn’t a recipe for blackstrap molasses, which will impart too bitter of a flavor.
Vanilla
As is the case with my blue corn pancake recipe, the donuts are really magically brought to life with vanilla. I 100% don’t see it as an optional ingredient here. Either use a natural, high-quality vanilla extract, or use vanilla powder, which is my personal preference in recipes like vegan bombolini and coconut panna cotta.
Plant Milk
This is critical, so listen up! The amount of milk used in the recipe depends on if you are going to roll and cut the dough, or if you intend to bake or use a donut dropper. Of course, for the donut dough to be rolled, it has to be stiff enough for that to happen. And likewise, if you are using a dropper or filling a donut pan with the batter, it has to be quite a bit looser.
Because brands vary greatly in their sweetness, I intentionally formulated this recipe with unsweetened, unflavored milk to provide the most consistent results for you. Soy milk is my number one choice, because it curdles best when it interacts with the acids in the yogurt and vinegar to result in a moister donut. But I have tested the recipe with oat milk, almond milk, and cashew milk and had great results with them too.
Brown sugar or coconut sugar
Brown sugar adds sweetness and helps the donuts retain moisture. My wife tries to consume minimally processed sugar, so coconut sugar, which is a lower glycemic option, is something I have tested these donuts with, and they come out great!
You can also substitute palm sugar in these, which is something I always have on hand for my endless addiction to Southeast Asian desserts, like Filipino karioka donuts, Malaysian banana donuts, Indonesian ondeh ondeh, Vietnamese kem chuối, and bubur cha cha from Singapore.
The Gingerbread Spices
I can’t really understate how the use of fresh, high-quality spices makes a world of difference in the flavor of these donuts, and in cooking in general. If you don’t have all of the spices I recommend, you can get away with using a generic pumpkin pie spice blend in place of them all, though the flavor will not be as nuanced and dialed-in.
If you are a regular on my blog, you already know I am head-over-heels-in-love shill for Burlap and Barrel. Particularly their buffalo ginger, which I use in this recipe, is the absolute best dried ginger I have ever had. Their cinnamon, and cloves are also the bomb, which is why they are in my vegan pumpkin donuts too. I have a special deal where you can get a jar of their wild mountain cumin seeds (they are legit INSANE) for free through my link. So, I am going to leave that link below for you to take advantage of.
Get my fave cumin seeds for free!
Using this link, add the wild mountain cumin to your cart, spend at least $15 on some of the other absurdly good spices from Burlap & Barrel (they all seriously slap) and the bottle of this bangin' wild mountain cumin becomes FREE, and you will love it so much.
*See the recipe card at the bottom of the page for exact quantities, nutritional info, and detailed cooking directions.
🤯Variations
Cream Cheese Frosted Vegan Gingerbread Donuts
I have a fantastic vegan cream cheese frosting recipe on the blog. You can either make it with store-bought cream cheese or with my easy, 4-ingredient, cultured vegan cream cheese recipe. Simply let the donuts cool, and then neatly pipe a circle of cream cheese frosting on the top with a pastry bag fitted with a star tip. Sprinkle the frosted donuts with cinnamon or powdered sugar.
Bourbon Cranberry Glazed Vegan Gingerbread Donuts
Toss 1 ½ cups of vegan royal icing in the blender with 2 tablespoons of bourbon cranberry sauce. Blend until smooth and glaze the donuts, one at a time, in the pretty pinkish glaze. Let the glaze set as the donuts cool on a wire rack for at least 5 minutes before serving.
Gear you need for this baking project
If you are baking:
For the baked variation of this recipe, you will need one or more donut pans.
If you are air-frying or making old-fashioned rolled donuts:
You will need a rolling pin, a donut cutter, and of course an air fryer if that’s how you plan to cook them.
For the most professional results, use a donut dropper!
Droppers allow you to work with a wetter batter, yielding perfectly shaped, moister cake donuts. Actually, a lot of my other donut recipes, like my matcha donuts for instance, I only include frying directions using a dropper, because it's so much better.
In my opinion, Belshaw Type K droppers are the gold standard, especially if you’re serious about making donuts at home, like the ones I teach in my vegan cake donut class.
They aren’t cheap to buy. If you’re buying one used, make sure to verify that the plunger creates a donut shape (some only make circles for depositing pancakes and muffins). If the seller doesn’t know, ask for test photos with a simple flour-and-water mix. There’s also a reasonably high-quality Belshaw knockoff available on Amazon, though
🍩 How to make vegan gingerbread donuts
Nail this festive treat on your first shot by following these step-by-step photos with helpful tips. Or scroll down to the bottom of this page for the easy-to-print recipe card.
Step One
Old Mix Donald Had a Farm:
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the non-dairy milk, apple cider vinegar, yogurt, molasses, oil (or melted vegan butter), brown sugar, and vanilla extract until the mixture is smooth and creamy.
If you’re baking or using a donut dropper, or plan to bake the donuts in a donut pan, stir in the additional plant-based milk too.
Step Two
Sift Happens:
In another bowl, either whisk or sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, ground ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves, fresh ginger, and salt. Gradually fold the dry ingredients into the wet mixture until you have a smooth batter.
If you’re rolling and cutting, either for air-fryer cooked or stove frying, mix until a slightly sticky, tacky dough forms that is just firm enough to roll carefully but still on the soft side.
✅ You can either mix this by hand or mix it for about 30-40 seconds on low speed in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Whatever you do: DO NOT OVER-MIX!
🍩 Donut Cooking Methods
Cooking Method 1: Dropped Cake Donuts (My Personal Fave!)
- Heat oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat to 350°F (175°C).
- Fill the hopper of your donut dropper with the batter. Test the batter by dropping one or two initial donuts back into the batter bowl to ensure even flow (you can return these to the hopper).
- Carefully drop the batter into the oil in rounds, being careful not to overcrowd the pot.
Fry each donut for 2-3 minutes on each side until golden. - Remove with a slotted spoon and transfer to a cooling rack over a lined baking pan for easy cleanup.
Cooking Method 2: Baked Vegan Gingerbread Donuts
- Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Lightly grease a donut pan.
- Spoon or pipe the batter into each cavity, filling them about ¾ full.
- Bake for 15-18 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted into a donut.
- Let them cool in the pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack set over a lined baking pan for easy cleanup.
Cooking Method 3: Roll-And-Cut Fried Gingerbread Donuts
- Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface. Pat the dough down, and roll it out with a lightly floured rolling pin to about ¾-inch (about 2 cm) thick. Use a bench scraper or knife to make sure the dough isn’t sticking to your work surface and its gluten is fairly relaxed.
- Use a donut cutter to cut out your donut shapes, re-rolling scraps as necessary.
- Heat oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat to approximately 350°F (175°C). Use a frying thermometer to check the oil temperature.
Carefully transfer the donuts into the hot oil, cooking them for 2-3 minutes on each side until they’re golden brown. - Remove with a slotted spoon and place on a cooling rack set over a baking pan lined with parchment paper for easy cleanup.
Cooking Method 4: Roll-And-Cut Air Fried Vegan Gingerbread Donuts
- Follow the rolling and cutting instructions.
- Preheat your air fryer to 350°F (175°C), spraying the basket liberally with cooking spray.
- Arrange the donuts in a single layer in the basket and cook for 6-8 minutes, flipping halfway through, until they turn golden and are cooked through.
- Check for internal doneness with a toothpick.
Finish Them Darned Donuts Already!
While your gingerbread donuts are still warm, toss them in a large bowl filled with sugar and cinnamon until fully coated for that perfect cinnamon sugar finish.
Maple Glazed and Confused
Otherwise, in a medium bowl, whisk together powdered sugar, maple syrup, and a pinch of salt until smooth.
After the donuts have cooled to room temperature, dip them in the glaze, allowing any excess to drip off before placing them back on a wire rack to set.
👉Top tips
- If Baking - Pipe the Batter: For neater donuts that release more easily from the pans, use a piping bag or make a piping cone with parchment paper to neatly fill the donut pan with batter.
- If You Are Using a Donut Cutter: dip the edge of the cutter in flour to make it easier to get the moist dough out of cutter.
- If Frying: Don’t overcrowd the pot. If you don’t give the donuts room, they will be hard to flip, and may have the tendency to become misshapen. Additionally, adding too many donuts to the oil all at once lowers the oil temperature, causing the donuts to absorb more oil.
- Don’t Overmix: Combine the wet and dry ingredients just until the dough or batter (depending on your chosen cooking method) forms. Overmixing will lead to dense donuts or ones that drop unevenly into the oil, coming out looking sloppy.
- Monitor Cooking Time: For fried donuts, especially the looser kind that have been formed with a dropper, you want to flip them when the batter in the center of the tops starts to liquefy and look bubbly and runny. Flipping them at that point will result in the best formation. For baked donuts, no flipping is required, but you should check for doneness with a toothpick to make sure they are cooked through, but not dry and over-baked.
- Storage for Freshness: If you're preparing the donuts ahead of time, allow them to cool completely before icing and storing them in an airtight container. Never refrigerate donuts as they will get stiff and bready that way. That being said, you can freeze the baked donuts without icing, thaw, and briefly bring them back to life for a few minutes in a hot oven or air fryer, and glaze them when ready to serve.
🤷♀️ Recipe FAQs
Vegan Gingerbread Donuts are delightful when served warm, served with vegan eggnog, or some hot Bandrek tea (my fam’s favorite herbal tea from Indonesia).
If a full morning of donut-making projects sounds fun to you, these are great as part of a donut assortment with Korean donuts, picarones, zeppole, and vegan apple fritters too!
Yes, you can substitute whole wheat flour for all-purpose flour, but it will result in denser, less fluffy donuts.
To make gluten-free Vegan Gingerbread Donuts, replace all-purpose flour with a gluten-free flour blend. These work best baked in a donut pan, which will prevent them from getting dry or crumbly on you.
Swap out the oil in the recipe with applesauce, and bake them in a silicone donut pan.
After making your gingerbread donuts, that leftover oil is still perfect for frying a few tasty classics. You could use it for Tempe Mendoan, Bakwan Sayur, Vegan Fried Chicken, Thai Spring Rolls, or Crispy Onion Bhaji.
To store it, let the oil cool completely, then strain it through a fine mesh to catch any particles, which will cause the oil to go rancid quickly if you leave them in. Transfer it to an airtight container and store it somewhere cool and dark, aiming to use it within a few weeks. Keep in mind that reused oil can oxidize over time, which reduces its quality and isn’t the healthiest.
✌️You'll love these other vegan donut recipes too
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For just $1: Take a fun vegan dessert cooking class with Cinnamon Snail’s Chef Adam Sobel and Chef Amanda Bankert from Boneshaker, Paris.
Vegan Gingerbread Donuts (Baked, Fried, or Air-Fried)
Equipment
- Optional equipment:
Ingredients
Wet Ingredients:
- ¼ cup unsweetened plant-based milk
- 2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
- ¼ cup unsweetened plant-based yogurt
- ¼ cup molasses regular unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap
- ⅓ cup canola oil
- 1 cup brown sugar or coconut sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
If Baking Or Using a Donut Dropper:
- ½ cup unsweetened plant-based milk additional
Dry Ingredients:
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 ¼ teaspoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon dried ground ginger
- 1 ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon nutmeg
- ½ teaspoon ground cardamom
- ¼ teaspoon ground cloves
- 2 ½ teaspoons grated fresh ginger
- ¾ teaspoon salt
Optional Maple Glaze:
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- ½ cup maple syrup
- ¼ teaspoon salt
Instructions
Mixing The Donut Batter (or dough if you are following the roll-and-cut method):
- In a large bowl, combine the plant-based milk and apple cider vinegar, yogurt, molasses, oil, brown sugar, and vanilla extract, stirring until smooth. If you are baking the donuts or using a donut dropper, add the additional plant-based milk to this mixture and stir until fully combined.
- In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, ground ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves, fresh ginger, and salt. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, folding gently until a smooth batter forms. For the roll-and-cut method, mix only until a sticky, tacky dough forms.
Cooking Options:
Roll-and-Cut Donuts (Fried):
- Transfer the dough onto a lightly floured surface. Pat it to roughly a ¾-inch (about 2 cm) thickness and cut out donut shapes with a donut cutter, re-rolling scraps as needed.
- Heat oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat (to approximately 350°F/175°C).
- Carefully lower the donuts into the hot oil, cooking them for 2-3 minutes on each side or until golden.
- Remove with a slotted spoon and transfer to a cooling rack suspended over a baking pan that’s lined with parchment paper for easy cleanup.
Roll-and-Cut Donuts (Air Fried):
- Follow the instructions for rolling and cutting.
- Preheat your air fryer to 350°F (175°C). Thoroughly oil the air-frying basket.
- Place donuts in a single layer in the basket and cook for 6-8 minutes, flipping halfway through, until they are golden and cooked through.
- Transfer to a cooling rack.
Baked Donuts (Donut Pan):
- Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Lightly grease a donut pan.
- Spoon or pipe the batter into the pan, filling each cavity about ¾ full.
- Bake for 15-18 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into a donut comes out clean. Let cool for 5 minutes in the pan.
- Transfer to a cooling rack suspended over a baking pan that’s lined with parchment paper for easy cleanup.
Drop Donuts (Using a Donut Dropper):
- Preheat oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat to 350°F (175°C), using a frying thermometer to make sure you have reached that temperature range.
- Fill the hopper of the donut dropper with batter and drop one or two initial donuts back into the batter bowl to make sure the batter is coming out evenly. (You can put those initial test drops back into the hopper).
- Carefully drop the batter into the oil in rounds, making sure not to overcrowd the pot.
- Fry each donut for 2-3 minutes on each side until golden. Remove with a slotted spoon and transfer to a cooling rack suspended over a baking pan that’s lined with parchment paper for easy cleanup.
Finishing:
- Cinnamon Sugar Coating: While donuts are still warm, place them into a large bowl with the sugar and cinnamon, and toss until fully coated.
- Maple Glaze: In a medium bowl, whisk together powdered sugar, maple syrup, and salt until smooth. Dip the cooled donuts in the glaze, allowing any excess to drip off before returning them to a wire rack to set.
Notes
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Ja Williams says
I prepared the gingerbread doughnut recipe using the baked variation . The donuts were outstanding. Rave reviews from non vegans on taste & texture. The gingerbread flavor and spice level were perfection . I’m looking forward to making the fried version for the holidays. My only criticism of the recipe is that it’s doesn’t measure the ingredients by weight.
Kelly McLaughlin says
I absolutely love this recipe! The spices are spot-on and result in a deep flavour that’s perfect for the holidays!
Kimbi Walton says
Easy to follow instructions led to a beautiful baked, gluten free scrumptious donut. My family is very pleased!