Is Cake Frosting Vegan?

Often times when I tell someone I am a vegan, they express what almost seems like sadness for me. I think they fall under a general assumption that because I am a vegan, I never get to eat anything particularly indulgent, or fun. The fact of the matter is, I could probably stand to cut down on the amount of decadent foods I eat too much of – one of those being cake frosting. As shocking as it might seem, cake frosting is sometimes vegan. It’s one of those foods that seems like it should be full of dairy yet rarely contains any at all.

Cake Frosting Ingredients

The ingredients in cake frosting will vary greatly from one brand, or flavor, or recipe to another. However, some common ingredients that appear in most store-bought cake frostings are as follows: sugar, high fructose corn syrup, soybean oil, and other vegetable oils.

Sugar

Sugar might be a problem for you. As you may or may not know, refined sugar is sometimes passed through charred animal bones as a final step in the filtering process. Unfortunately, there’s just no way of knowing if the sugar in the cake frosting you’re eating has gone through this process.

Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines

After looking over all the ingredients labels listed on the General Mills website, it appears that none of the Betty Crocker cake frostings are vegan. All of them contain milk and/or eggs. Duncan Hines, on the other hand, is surprisingly vegan friendly. Many of their cake frostings are vegan. IsItVegan.com posted a huge list of Duncan Hines frosting flavors that are vegan here.

Homemade Cake Frosting

I’d be wary of eating someone else’s homemade cake frosting. The chances of it containing heavy cream, or milk, or butter, or all of the above are far too great. At the very least, I would suggest asking whoever made it if they used any dairy products. That being said, there’s nothing stopping you from making your own cake frosting that is 100 percent vegan. Chow.com has an excellent recipe here for vegan buttercream frosting.