Vegan Gingerbread Cookies are perfect for your holiday baking schedule. These spiced cookies make for a great alternative to decorating.
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Love cutout sugar cookies, but just want something with a little more spice? The hack is always just to make this vegan gingerbread cookie recipe!
Whether you want gingerbread men, houses, or just a simple round cookie, this dough can do it all!
Pair our dairy free gingerbread cookies with either dairy free vanilla frosting or royal icing to decorate for any holiday season. You could even pair these dairy free cookies with a dairy free chocolate frosting if you’d prefer.
Jump to:
- Why You’ll Love these
- Ingredients for how to make gingerbread cookies recipe:
- #1 tip for making vegan gingerbread cookies:
- What other products would help with how to make gingerbread cookies recipe?
- What other vegan cookies can I make?
- 🥳 Get the Full Recipe
- Frequently Asked Questions:
- 💬 See What People Are Saying
Why You’ll Love these
- Easy – I don’t think you can say this enough, but this vegan cookie recipe is truly easy! There’s no obscure ingredients, it’s all pantry staples, so you can have it whenever you want!
- Freezable – You have two options, freeze the dough before cooking or bake your cookies, let them cool and then store in the freezer for up to 6 months.
- Customizable – whether you want gingerbread men, shapes to build a gingerbread house or everything in between, this dough can do it
Ingredients for how to make gingerbread cookies recipe:
Gather all your ingredients:
Flour
We want to make this recipe simple, so we’re using regular, all-purpose flour. You will want to make sure that you are properly measuring the flour and not over measuring.
Substitute: Want to make it gluten free? Try using Pillsbury 1:1 Flour. We’ve had the best success with this recipe using it. You can also use our Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.
Brown Sugar (and Molasses)
This recipe uses only brown sugar for these cookies. Brown sugar gives a softer and chewier texture while also creating a caramelization from the molasses that just heightens the sweetness. It also gives a higher rise to the cookies when it reacts to baking soda.
Substitute: You can use other granulated sugars like date sugar or coconut sugar in the same amounts.
Non-Dairy Butter
We want the buttery taste, it’s deliciousness, but also for the oil in the batter. You will want to use a vegan butter that has oil listed as the first ingredient and not water – and use sticks instead of tubs based on our vegan butter review.
Substitute: Coconut oil will work as well; however, you’ll loose some of the buttery taste
Flax Seed and Water
When you combine these two you get a flax egg. This mimics the texture and helps to bind like traditional egg world.
Substitute: You can sub for ¼ cup of applesauce, non-dairy yogurt, thick coconut cream (from a chilled can of full fat coconut milk), etc
Vanilla
Not only for flavor, but it also helps with the texture
Salt
Helps to enhance the overall flavor and bring out all the notes you want to taste
Baking Soda
This is our leavening agent that spread the cookies to the perfect size and aeration, as well as the crisp.
Spices
You’ll need cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and ground ginger. These are warming spices that make these cookie have their golden brown texture.
#1 tip for making vegan gingerbread cookies:
Try to use the same size cut outs when cooking so they cook evenly and you don’t have overdone and uncooked cookies on the same try.
For example, if you are cutting out 1″ snowflakes and 3″ gingerbread men, you’ll want to cook all the snowflakes first and then do a separate batch with the bigger cut outs.
What other products would help with how to make gingerbread cookies recipe?
You’ll need:
- Baking Sheets
- Rolling Pin
- Cooling Racks
- Parchment Paper
- Gingerbread Men Cookie Cutters and other Cookie Cutters
- Vegan royal icing , Vanilla Frosting or Chocolate Frosting
- Piping Bag and Tips
- Sprinkles or Other Decorations
- Cookie Tin
What other vegan cookies can I make?
If you love baking cookies for the holidays, then you are in for a treat. These are part of our 12 days of cookies and here’s a few more for you to try. All our cookie recipes are vegan (dairy and egg free) and most about allergen friendly?
🥳 Get the Full Recipe
Homemade Gingerbread Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon ground flax seed
- 3 tablespoons water
- ¾ cup vegan butter, softened (170g)
- ¾ cup brown sugar (165g)
- ⅔ cup molasses (227g)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 3 ¼ cup flour (390g)
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 tablespoon ground ginger
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon cloves
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ¼ teaspoon nutmeg
- Royal Icing recipe, Optional
Instructions
- Combine 1 tablespoon ground flax seed with 3 tablespoon water and in a small bowl and let sit for 10 minutes. *This makes a flax egg.
- While that's sitting, in a large bowl, beat together ¾ cup softened vegan butter, ¾ cup brown sugar and ⅔ cup molasses until creamy, about 3 minutes. When flax egg is ready, add that and 1 teaspoon vanilla to the bowl and beat again.
- Add in 3 ¼ cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1 tablespoon ground ginger, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, ½ teaspoon each cloves and salt, and ¼ teaspoon nutmeg. Stir these together with a spatula until combined.
- Use hands to form 2 equal size balls. Set aside. Lay down a piece of parchment paper, then one ball, then another same size piece of parchment paper on top. Roll out dough to ¼" thick.
- Preheat oven to 350˚F (177˚C) and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Cut out gingerbread men or other desired shapes. Transfer cut outs to a baking sheet.
- Place in oven and cook for 9-11 minutes. *Shorter time for smaller cut outs, longer time for bigger cut outs.
- Remove and transfer to a cooling rack and allow to cool completely before icing. Repeat with remaining ball of dough.
- Decorate as desired. We recommend our vegan royal icing to decorate these dairy free gingerbread cookies.
Notes
Nutrition
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Frequently Asked Questions:
A flax egg is a combination of ground flax seeds and water that after sitting, will turn gelatinous.
This mixture gives you a vegan replacement for eggs that works great in many baked goods, like these vegan gingerbread cookies.
When you are making dark colored cookies, it is not always easy to tell since you can’t just see golden brown. Vegan gingerbread cookies are done when the edges are firm if gently touched with a spatula.
Absolutely!
The two allergens in our written recipe is vegan butter (soy) and flour (gluten).
The vegan butter can easily be swapped for a soy free vegan butter. We love Earth Balance soy free for this. It comes in a red tub.
For the flour, you can use Measure for Measure Gluten Free flour in this cookie recipe.
Yes! You can make these a few days in advance if you plan to make ahead and decorate at another time or even decorate and take with you a few days from now.
Alternatively, you can make the dough and freeze the dough if you don’t need all of it at one time. Just let completely thaw before rolling out and cutting into shapes.
This post was originally published in December 2019 and updated in September 2025.
I have been looking for the right gingerbread recipe for a long, long time, mainly wanting to replicate (UK) supermarket Gingerbread men/women/people that my daughters love (but can’t always eat due to ingredients) … and after many, many, many fails… I’ve found it!
with so many trials and errors I’m always a bit hesitant to try new ones but I’m so so glad I did today! They have the right spice mix, the right softness and crunch but most importantly are easy to make – an easy to follow recipe!
thankyou so much!
To put it into perspective, after thoroughly enjoying decorating the biscuits (we used a simple glaze icing not the royal icing, this time) my daughters and her friends ate their creations…and the verdicts were “oh my god, wow! this is the best cookie I’ve eaten” “wow mummy these are the best ones you’ve ever made” (both 8yr olds); oohh these are good mummy, how many am I allowed to eat today?(6yr old) ; these are too good to eat, can I take all of these home (our 4yr old guest!)
OMG! We love this so much. I’m so glad to hear that it was a hit with everyone.
I use your everything bread recipe
(which is fantastic, especially for challah) and I wanted to make hunger bread for the first time, so your recipe was the obvious choice.
IWe are in the UK,so couldn’t get molasses. We swapped it for black treacle. I used vitalite for the ‘butter’ ( just in case anyone from the UK needs a brand ) and added so much more Cinnamon because I’m crazy about it.
It was fantastic and I wish we could post photos.
thank you 😊 ❤️
Feel free to send photos to our email at [email protected]. Glad you liked these!
I made your gingerbread cookie recipe today. What a delicious cookie. I must have a small cookie cutter. I ended up with more than 36 cookies. I’m tired. LOL🙄The BEST part was actually having the royal icing work. I’ve tried so many RI recipes that taste terrible & don’t work ! I’m only using your recipe from now on! Now, I can bake cookies for Valentine’s Day using RI. They just look so pretty! Thank you for sharing! Merry Christmas & Happy 2023🎉🍾🎉
So happy to hear that! Happy New Year!
I made these today and they tasted great! But the dough was quite wet so I found it very difficult to keep the cookies in their gingerbread person shape when transferring them to the cookie sheet. Will the dough firm up if I refrigerated it for an hour or so beforehand next time?
I’m struggling with how dry these cookies are. Well, the batter. It falls apart and cracks really easily. Help!
Hi Niki, Did you make any changes?
hi i would love to try this cookie recipe but where I stay we do not get vegan butter. can I use any unflavored oil or nut butters. thanks
We’ve never tried to be honest so we can’t really tell you how it would come out. Nut butters won’t work. We don’t think most oils would work well, but possibly a firm, not melted coconut oil would be best to test
Best gingerbread cookies ever! I love the cookies and they are now a favorite! People who don’t typically like gingerbread even like it!
Amazing, so happy to hear
I’m excited to try this recipe today to make our gingerbread house! Do you think I should leave it in the oven longer?Anything else you think I should do to make it a house?
Sorry we didn’t see this before, but we’d leave it in a tad longer.