Gluten Free Cinnamon Roll Cake (Dairy Free)

Craving cinnamon rolls but don’t have time to make them? Bake our Cinnamon Roll Cake instead! It’s gluten free, dairy free, egg free, and easy to make.

If you’re craving cinnamon rolls but don’t have time to go through the whole process of making them, you can make a gluten free and dairy free Cinnamon Roll Cake instead!

We love cinnamon rolls, but I haven’t come up with a good allergy friendly cinnamon roll alternative since I’m not great at making gluten free breads (yet).

So I decided to make the next best thing: a cinnamon roll cake that’s gluten free, dairy free, and egg free!

It took us a while to test this recipe since I wanted to get it just right, but we finally hit on the right combo for the cinnamon swirls in this cake.

This would even be perfect as a coffee cake for a decadent breakfast or brunch as well!

We loved this cake by itself without a glaze, but we also tested this with our dairy free cream cheese glaze drizzled on top, too, to see how it tasted.

I prefered our cinnamon roll cake plain, but you can add the glaze before serving if you want, or you can serve the glaze in a bowl on the side for anyone who wants to add it.

How to make gluten free cinnamon roll cake

Our dairy free cinnamon roll cake looks a little different than some recipes I’ve seen for this type of cake online. Some people’s recipes have more folds and swirls in them, but since this recipe doesn’t have eggs or dairy, I don’t make the batter very thick or it tends to be dry and not rise well.

So this recipe does not have quite as many folds and swirls as some other cinnamon roll cakes.

With some versions, they just add dollops of the cinnamon butter mixture onto the batter and then drag a knife through it. But I found that our recipe works best when the cinnamon butter is good and soft and it’s piped onto the batter, then the knife is moved through it for swirls.

Here’s how to make our gluten free cinnamon roll cake (don’t forget the full recipe card is at the end of the post!):

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F prepare an 8×8-inch square baking pan. Set aside.
• In a small bowl, cream together the brown sugar, dairy free butter, cinnamon, and flour until smooth. Make sure the dairy free butter is nice and soft for the best swirl!
• Scoop the cinnamon butter into a small plastic bag and snip the end off the bag for piping. Set aside.
• In a medium sized bowl, whisk together the sorghum flour, sugar, ground flaxseed, baking powder, and salt.
• Whisk in the dairy free milk, oil, and vanilla until mixed thoroughly.
• Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan.
• Pipe the soft cinnamon butter across the cake batter in lines, then drag a knife cross-wise across the lines of cinnamon butter.
• Bake in the preheated oven for 35 minutes.
• Allow to cool for about 30 minutes before slicing and serving.

You’ll notice in my photos that I piped the cinnamon butter kind of thick onto the cake batter. I accidentally made it a bit too thick, so I’d recommend piping them thinner than that. Just cut the corner of your plastic bag a bit smaller.

Piping the cinnamon butter a bit smaller makes it easier to get more swirls, but it won’t sink into the cake as much either.

So you can choose to pipe it thick and have the swirl sink into the cake more (like in our photos), or you can pipe it smaller and it stays on top of the cake more. Play around with it and see which method you prefer!

But either way you choose to pipe the cinnamon butter, the swirling works best if the it’s really soft. If your dairy free butter is not very soft, microwave it for 5-10 seconds or so until it is very soft when mixing it together so it’s easier to make swirls without it clumping together.

In my photos, my cinnamon butter was admittedly not soft enough, so it resisted the swirling a bit and tired to stick together. Just make sure that your butter is soft, but not completely melted for the best swirls!

Also make sure that you have adequate spacing between your lines of cinnamon butter so that they are separate and will sink into the cake. If you don’t end up using all of the cinnamon butter, that’s ok since this recipe has a good bit of cinnamon butter in it.

Making sure your cake is baked completely

A small knife inserted into the cake part of the pan won’t come out completely clean, but that’s okay since it has the cinnamon butter swirl in it and it will seem more wet at first till it cools.

But if your cake seems a little jiggly in the middle when you take it out of the oven, bake it for another 3 minutes. I noticed that my cake in my deeper 8×8 pan had to bake an than my other 8×8 pan since the deeper pan was slightly smaller than 8×8 (the cake in my smaller but deeper pan needed baked slightly longer).

What dairy free butter should I use?

We used the Country Crock avocado oil plant butter sticks in this recipe, but I think that any brand of dairy free butter should work in this recipe (such as Miyokos, Earth Balance, etc.).

We can’t have soybean oil so we used the Country Crock plant butter sticks, which do not have soybean oil in them. But their plant butter in tubs does have soybean oil, so make sure to read the labels.

Earth Balance Soy Free is also a great soy-free butter alternative that would probably work great in this recipe. Miyokos also makes a cultured oat milk dairy free butter now if you want to try that brand but can’t have their regular cashew recipe!

The Miyokos oat milk butter is really good and super creamy, but my body doesn’t like cultured products since I think I have a histamine intolerance. So I couldn’t have too much of that butter before I started having headaches 🙁 But if you can have it, it’s delicious!

Check out our other gluten free cake recipes!

• Gluten Free Coffee Cake with Pears
• Gluten Free Lemon Cupcakes
• Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Cake with Maple Glaze
• Fudgy Chocolate Puddle Cake
• Banana Cake with Easy Caramel Sauce