These homemade vegan lemon cupcakes are soft, light, fluffy, and bursting with delicious lemon flavor!
Want to know the BEST thing about this lemon cupcake recipe?
You might already have all of the ingredients on hand to make them, and there’s no need to buy any expensive specialty flours or sweeteners.
Plus, the vegan cupcakes can be made with NO flax eggs!
You may also like this Vegan Banana Bread
The lemon cupcakes can be baked up the day before, are easy to transport, and don’t need any refrigeration, so they’re a great option for outdoor gatherings.
I made the recipe for a spring picnic to celebrate a friend’s birthday a few weeks ago, and they went over really well with the human guests.
(Three sneaky puppies in attendance tried their best but were eventually thwarted from getting a cupcake.)
Feel free to frost the cupcakes with your favorite homemade or store-bought white, vanilla, buttercream, or Vegan Cream Cheese frosting.
Or ice with melted Coconut Butter, powdered sugar glaze (1/2 cup powdered sugar mixed with 1 tbsp milk of choice), or Coconut Whipped Cream.
If you want keto lemon cupcakes:
Instead of the recipe below, use this recipe for Keto Muffins, and add 1 tsp lemon zest to the batter. Top with powdered monkfruit blend or sugar free frosting of choice.
If you want gluten free lemon cupcakes:
The recipe works with oat flour, and you can buy certified-gluten-free oat flour if you need to make sure the package you’re buying has been made in a separate facility from products containing gluten.
I haven’t tried the cupcakes yet with a gluten free flour blend but have had success with Bob’s cup-for-cup blend in other recipes, so feel free to experiment with that one.
Above, watch the step-by-step lemon cupcake recipe video
Vegan Lemon Cupcakes
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 1/2 cup water
- 2 tbsp oil, or applesauce or mashed banana for fat free
- zest of one lemon (important)
- 1 cup spelt, white, or oat flour (a keto option is mentioned above)
- 3/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/8 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 cup sugar, unrefined if desired
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 F. Line a cupcake pan. Whisk first four ingredients and let sit at least ten minutes. You can stir together all remaining ingredients while you wait. Combine all ingredients to form a batter. Portion into the lined pan, only filling 2/3 of the way up because they'll rise. Bake 17 minutes on the center rack. Let cool. These are even sweeter the next day, and the liners peel off easily if they sit a day as well. View Nutrition Facts
Notes
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More Cupcake Recipes:
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Pat Schwab says
About how many cupcakes does one batch make? Thanks
Chloe says
Above the ingredient list it says 6 – 7 cupcakes.
Mandy says
Hi Katie! The recipe made 6 pretty small cupcakes. I iced mine using 1/2 cup icing sugar and 3 tblspns lemon juice. Yummy! But I had a lot of trouble getting them out if the psper wrappers. They ended up being more like cupcake TOPS! I chose to use applesauce instead of oil. Could that have been my problem? And they didn’t rise much either. What have I done wrong?
Leona Daniels says
I was testing some lemon cupcake recipes to see which one was the best and this was the clear winner. Thank you for this amazing recipe!
Millie says
Whoa! Those cupcakes look like they’re store-bought! 🤤
christine says
So I made these and upon wooden skewer testing and overall look, they looked great. But when you touch them and take them apart, their consistency was like glue. Can’t eat glue-like cupcakes. Any clue of what i did wrong?
Kim says
I made these today for the 2nd time, and honesly they were so moist and decadent, truly beautiful. My work friends also loved them. They were gone in seconds.
Thanks for the amazing recipe
Katie H. says
I made these tonight and they turned out perfectly! So good! I used King Arthur GF flour and avacado oil. They were the perfect fit for the foods we have to avoid in our family– gluten, eggs, dairy, corn, nuts. I will definitely put this recipe in our favorites pile!