Vegan apple fritters – light and crunchy outside and packed full of spiced apple! Enrobed in a cinnamon glaze with a slight hint of cardamom – they’re my go-to vegan apple fritter!
Allow me to have a quick chat about these vegan apple fritters – also known as CRISPY APPLE SPICE BOMBS in my kitchen (by me, only I call them that..).
These guys are everything a vegan apple fritter should be: They’re basically half spiced apple pie, half donut. The batter is moist and rich which crisps up on the outside like you wouldn’t believe.
The apple is beautifully elevated by the peoples favourite CINNAMON and boosted with a little kick of cardamom. As you can probably tell, I’m VERY fond of these little fellas.
A vegan apple fritter a day keeps the blues at bay!
So most apple fritter recipes out there are yeasted. This means that instead of using baking baking powder to help them stay light and fluffy, they use yeast. As you’re probably aware, this involves proving (i.e. letting the mixture rise) before it can be cooked.
But here’s the thing. When I want a vegan apple fritter, I tend to want it LIKE FIVE MINUTES AGO! Not after 2 hours of proving. I want it STAT!
So my goal here was to develop a recipe which could be WHIPPED up in a flash, for fresh, toasty, spiced easy vegan apple fritters.
How d’ya like them apples??
When it comes to vegan apple fritters, not all apples are created equal! What you’re trying to avoid with this recipe is a soft, soggy inside with overcooked apples which turn to mush as soon as they hit the fryer.
That’s why I INSIST that you use baking apples for this recipe! That’s why this easy vegan apple fritter recipe is THE BEST!
If you can’t get hold of baking apples (such as bramley, janagold or honeycrisp) try to use the most tart apple you can find (a granny smith is a good alternative!). The reason for this is two-fold:
1. TEXTURE!
When you cook an apple, like most fruits and veggies, it’ll soften somewhat. The longer you cook, the more it will soften. Cooking apples tend to keep their “bite” better than regular eating apples. This means your finished product will be chunky and al dente rather than mushy and squishy!
2. FLAVA!
Again, as with most fruits, when you cook an apple one of the first things that happens is it loses its sharpness. Acidity is what makes fruit exciting – it counterbalances the natural sugars leaving you with a much more complex flavour profile.
If you cook fruit for too long, you lose all the acidity and just end up with sweetness. This aint good. Cooking apples have a much higher acidity than regular apples, so they can stand up to a bit of high temperature without losing all of that 3D flavour excitement!
Bingo! A delicious vegan apple fritter (or twelve…)!
Nice ‘n’ spicy!
As everyone knows, an apple’s best mate is CINNAMON! They’re ALWAYS hanging out together, in apple pies, donuts, turnovers, crumbles and this vegan apple fritter recipe is no exception!
However, if you’ve been following School Night Vegan for a little while you’ll know that MY best mate is CARDAMOM!
I love how bold and exotic the flavour is. It reminds me of when I got engaged, on a park bench in Stockholm with a cardamom bun in my hand!
By all means, if you want to go rogue with the spices in this vegan apple fritter recipe then please do! Here are some other suggestions which would work well:
- NUTMEG – there’s a little nutmeg in this recipe already, but if you like that vibe – double the amount!
- CLOVES – if you’re making these in autumn or winter, why not throw in some ground cloves to give everything a festive kick? One 1/4 tsp should do it!
- GINGER – ground ginger is one of my fave spices ever – I love the extra kick of heat it brings to sweet dishes. It would work beautifully with the apples in this recipe. Throw in a quarter tsp if you’re down!
While you’re got the fryer out…
It’s always a bit of a faff to get the fryer out, or even to fill a pan with oil and bring it to temperature, so why not make my Chocolate Creme Filled Donuts or my Onion Bhajis while you’re at it??
Equipment
- Probe or candy thermometer
Ingredients
For the Apple Fritters
- 2 tbsp ground flax seeds (chia or linseed are also great)
- 4 tbsp water
- 2 baking apples (large! Peeled, cored and cubed)
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 45 g vegan butter (melted)
- 150 g plant milk (I used oat)
- 2 tbsp granulated sugar
- 195 g plain white flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
- 1 pinch ground cardamom
- 1/2 tsp fine sea salt
- Vegetable oil for frying
For the Glaze
- 200 g icing sugar
- 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
- 3 tbsp plant milk
Instructions
To Make the Apple Fritters
- Combine the ground flax seed and the water. Whisk together in a small bowl and set aside to thicken.
- In a medium bowl, toss the peeled, cored and cubed apples in the lemon juice to stop them browning. Set aside.
- In a medium bowl, mix together the melted vegan butter, plant milk and thickened flax egg.
- In a separate medium bowl mix together the sugar, flour, baking powder, spices and salt.
- Add the better, milk, flax mixture to the dry ingredients and stir well to combine to form a thick batter. Using a slotted spoon, add the apples to the batter, leaving behind any extra lemon juice in the bowl. Mix the apples into the batter well and place in the fridge.
- In a high-sided medium saucepan, add a few inches of oil and bring to around 175c. (I use a probe or candy thermometer to make sure the temperature is right).
- Once hot, add a heaped dessert-spoon of the batter to the oil. Allow it to fry for around 30 seconds before carefully flipping it over and frying until golden brown all over. Use a slotted spoon or a spider to remove the fried fritter from the oil. Place on a wire cooling rack to drain while you cook the remaining batter.
- Once all the batter is cooked, allow the fritters to cool fully for around 15 minutes.
To Make the Glaze
- In a medium bowl, whisk together all the glaze ingredients.
- Once the fritters are cooled, drizzle a good dessert-spoon of the glaze over each fritter. Leave to set for a few minutes before serving.
the recipe i’ve been looking for all my vegan life… is HERE!!!! cannot wait to try!!! will send feedback!!
Hi, I’d love to make these, but could you please tell me what the size of a “dessert-spoon” is? I Googled it but it seemed like the photos show more than ‘2 teaspoon’ scoops. Thanks!
Sorry but this is a terrible recipe. They fell apart during frying 😔
These were wonderful! Trying them later with vanilla ice cream!
I used gluten free flour and coconut sugar. They were delicious but they didn’t cook through, even after 2 minutes per side so I cooked them one minute per side and then baked them in a 350F oven for 30 minutes on the cooling rack. It might have been the flour, or maybe my spoonfuls were too big (it did make 12 though)? Tastes marvelous though. Just needed the extra cooking time.
I had to use 3x the amount of flaxmeal, but they turned out alright. The oil definitely needs to be hotter than 175c and they need to cook longer than 30 seconds each side. I added extra cinnamon and cloves to both the glaze and the batter.
These were delicious! I might have done what Deborah did (make the spoon-fulls too big.) My donuts cooked through but were very greasy. Any tips for how to limit grease?
I used gluten free flour and the results were still bomb! Thank you!
I made these and they were incredible! So tasty and crunchy with a very strong spice flavour. The first attempt was a bit questionable because I made them too big and they were raw in the middle but after I split it and fried them for a bit longer they were perfect. None of my family members even knew they were vegan either haha. One thing i would say is they need quite a bit more time to cook then the recipe says but that might’ve just been my oil or something.(: I’ve just gone vegan in the last couple months and this recipe brings me comfort to know I can still enjoy my old non-vegan favourites in a form that’s better for the environment and animals well being. Again thanks so much and I hope everyone is staying happy and healthy out there.
We baked in oven, made them into little muffins they were delicious;)
OMG! I Love It 🙂
I make these with my teenage sons. Fail proof every time and we use GF flour instead of regular (weight for weight sub). I just love all of Richard’s recipes and, having been given a bag of cooking apples from a friend, I’ll be making these a lot in the next couple of weeks!
Great taste but So greasy and didn’t want to cook through 😭 also I Really don’t like trying to figure out how to measure when I am cooking! I don’t know how to measure grams😐
Hello Carly,
Unfortunately measuring is a rather essential part of cooking and I suspect this may have something to do with why your fritters were greasy. Grams are a unit of weight and are measured using scales. Would be great if you’d give the recipe another go using the correct measurements and perhaps reconsider that two star rating. Thanks anyway, Richard
Have you ever tried in an air fryer? If so, what settings?
I’ve made a lot of fritters, and this recipe proved to be the best of them so far. Crispy on the outside, cake on the inside, lots of apple flavor. Some notes for those who make it: (1) My dessert spoons are tiny, I wouldn’t use that as a measurement. I made some pretty big fritters, about the size of a my palm, as in the pictures. I got about 10 that size out of this recipe. (2) My cook time was much longer than indicated; I cooked the fritters until they had a nice brown color and a few test fritters I cut open were cooked through. Only if you are making donut hole size fritters would 30 seconds be appropriate. (3) Many of the comments suggest some found the fritters to be too oily. The amount of oil that gets soaked up is generally a function of oil temperature: oily fritters means the oil temp was too low. Check the oil temperature with an instant read thermometer, and let it rise slightly above the target temp of 175c (or 350 F), then put in a batch of three fritters or so. Cook both sides. Then test the temperature of the oil again, and ensure that it comes back up to slightly above the target temp (if it is way too low, you’ll need to turn up your heat; way too high, turn it down…it should be slightly below target at the end of the fry of a batch). Lots of people use a small pan and less oil because they think it is healthier to do so…but that’s not the case. Having lots of oil, in a big pan that retains heat (e.g. cast iron) is healthier for frying because the oil temp stays consistent at the correct temperature, and thus the fritters absorb less oil (meaning you eat less oil, avoiding the fatty calories). Let these fritters dry on a cooling rack – you may want to put them on a paper towel after a few minutes of cooling if you want to soak out some of the oil, though this may impact crispiness. My only gripe is the flax seeds: I find it hard to grind them down to a fine texture, so sometimes I’d get a seed stuck in my teeth. I was glad, though, that the flax seeds were not crunchy in the fritter.
Incredible! I followed the measurements on a scale and they came out amazing! I used the spoon to flatten the dough a bit on each one to cook evenly.
I think the people having trouble didn’t weight and used F instead of C for the oil.
I wish you could see pictures, just beautiful. Great Christmas morning treat.
These were yummy!! I fried in air fryer 370 degrees for 10 minutes. Family had no idea they were vegetarian!