Vegan Fudge Recipe
This vegan fudge recipe is what happens when five simple ingredients decide to show off a little. One square in and you'll swear you've uncovered a secret magic spell.
🔍 Recipe At-A-Glance: Vegan Fudge Recipe
- 🕰️ Prep Time: 3 minutes, plus an hour in the fridge.
- ⏰ Cook Time: Zip, zilch, zero.
- 🍫 Flavor Profile: Rich, velvety chocolate with a hint of coconut.
- 🍽️ Good For: Easy weeknight desserts and satisfying a sweet tooth.
- 🧡 Difficulty: If you can stir, you can make this coconut oil fudge!
"I thought you were hyping this recipe up. Oh. My. Dog. This is amazing. Its rich, smooth and decadent. I can't believe how easy and simple this is to make. Thank you for sharing, and so glad I stumbled upon it."
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🧡 Why You'll Love This Recipe
Hi friend: I'd like to introduce you to a little recipe that we make at our house all the time: coconut oil vegan fudge. It's our absolute favorite healthier dessert, and we almost always have all the ingredients we need to make it stocked in our pantry.
Here's why you'll love this recipe:
- Fits any dietary need: This fudge is different from regular fudge in that it is naturally sweetened, totally dairy-free, vegan, and gluten-free. It is packed with nutrients and good-for-you stuff (more desserts like this: these no-bake macaroons and these almond butter cookies).
- No fuss: No boiling hot sugar on the stove and fussing with a candy thermometer. No sticking something in the microwave for 10 minutes. Just five minute, deeply chocolatey fudge, with a gloriously awesome hint of coconut flavor.
🍫 The Ingredients You Need
- Coconut oil: The idea behind this fudge is that property that all coconut oil users know well: coconut oil is solid at room temperature, but anything above that, and it's a velvety smooth liquid oil.
- Maple syrup. If you want to make this fudge vegan, make sure you stick with maple syrup.
- Unsweetened cocoa powder. Not only does it give the recipe tons of rich, chocolatey-flavor, but cocoa powder is also easy to keep on hand in the pantry! I recommend using Dutch-process cocoa powder (the same stuff I use in my hot chocolate mix) for the best, rich dark chocolate flavor, but standard cocoa powder also does the trick!
Make sure to check the recipe card below for the full ingredients list, along with quantities and my expert tips and tricks.
🔁 Variations & Substitutions
- Honey fudge: If you just need this fudge to be dairy-free and aren't concerned about animal products, you can use honey in place of the maple syrup. Sometimes crystallized honey can cause issues with separation and make the fudge crumbly. If you are struggling with crumbling, bring the fudge back up to room temperature, and see if that helps soften the fudge.
- Peanut butter fudge: You can't go wrong with a peanut butter and chocolate combo (ahem, chocolate peanut butter overnight oats or chocolate peanut butter smoothie)! Just be aware that adding peanut butter will make coconut oil fudge a little less solid (but not less delicious).
- Chocolate orange: Replicate those chocolate oranges you can crack open at the holiday by stirring in some orange zest!
🥣 Vegan Fudge Recipe How-To
Step 1: Whisk the coconut oil with maple syrup, cocoa powder, vanilla, and salt until it is smooth as can be. No lumps allowed!
Step 2: Chill that sucker in the fridge. An hour later, out pops the most velvety, dense, and smooth fudge you've ever had...without a single second of cooking time.
Step 3: Pop the big brick of fudge out of the pan and cut into 9 pieces. Sprinkle with coconut and enjoy!
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🙋🏻♀️ Vegan Fudge Recipe FAQs
Most fudge isn't vegan because it contains dairy. But in this recipe, the coconut oil does the heavy lifting, making for a velvety-smooth fudge...without the dairy.
Regular fudge recipes can be super fussy, ending up gritty if you aren't careful. But because this vegan fudge recipe relies on coconut oil for its texture and consistency, you don't have to worry about that!
👩🏻🍳 My Expert Tips & Tricks
- Keep it smooth: If the fudge isn't quite coming together, the coconut oil may need to be a little warmer (and therefore more liquid). Heat the whole thing over very low heat and whisk again.
- Be speedy: Short on time (or just feeling impatient)? Pop the pan into the freezer instead of the fridge and it will be ready to cut in closer to 30 minutes!
- Small pan: A small pan will make the best thick pieces of fudge. I usually use a 6"x6" glass food storage container, but a mini muffin tin works too!
- Keep it chill: Store this coconut oil fudge in the fridge or it will get melty and messy!
💚 More Tasty Vegan Dessert Recipes:
If you tried this vegan fudge recipe or any other recipe on my blog, please leave a 🌟 star rating and let me know how it went in the comments!
📖 Recipe
Vegan Fudge
Ingredients
- ½ cup melted coconut oil
- ¼ cup honey or maple syrup
- ½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
- ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
- Pinch salt
- Unsweetened shredded coconut for garnish
Instructions
- Line a small square dish (I use this small square food storage container-it's perfect for this batch size) with parchment paper. Set aside.
- In a small bowl, whisk together ½ cup melted coconut oil, ¼ cup honey or maple syrup, ½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder, ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract, and Pinch salt until very smooth. If the mixture doesn't come together, heat over very low heat in a small saucepan until very smooth.
- Pour mixture into the prepared dish. Refrigerate until solid, about an hour, then sprinkle Unsweetened shredded coconut on top, and cut into 9 small pieces. If you're in a hurry, pop it in the freezer and you'll be ready to go in about half the time-although you might need to use a knife run under hot water to cut through it.
This is truly the EASIEST chocolate dessert I've ever made!
This is the worst recipe! I keep making it over and over again 🙂 I had a craving one night for fudge and wanted something with ingredients I had on hand. I did use refined coconut oil as I wanted a pure chocolate flavour with no coconut and I added about a 1/3 cup of melted dark chocolate cause why not? It's delicious. Everyone who's tried it has loved it.
I just made this and was widking on very low temp in stove and it really didn't come together, I was at it for awhile but there was a lot of liquid and clumps of I guess the coconut oil, just didn't get incorporated, not sure what I did wrong. But it's in the fridge and I'm hoping something happens in the cold and it all comes together.
Hi Colleen! The main thing is to melt the coconut oil. So if you were whisking over low heat and it was still solid, the best thing would be to turn up the heat a little at a time and try to get it to fully melt. Once it's completely liquid, everything else should incorporate easily! It's possible that the addition of the other ingredients dropped the temps enough to cause it to clump up (especially if you keep your maple syrup in the fridge!), but putting it over low heat should have smoothed it out again. Hopefully all went well once you stashed it in the fridge! Please let me know if you need to troubleshoot further. I'm happy to help!
I would have found it more useful if you had just spelled out the best dimensions for the glass container to put the fudge into, instead of directing us to a set of glass containers on Amazon (which have a variety of sizes). Why make us guess?
Hi Pat! Thanks for your feedback. The container that Cassie used was approximately 6" x 6". I hope that helps!
How long does this fudge last at room temperature? What are the storage instructions?
Hi Christine! We recommend storing this in an airtight container in the fridge!
This fudge is an incredible sweet, rich delicacy! I love it and will make it again!
Do you have nutrition on this?
There are lots of great calorie calculators out there that you can use.
The calorie counter in the above common no longer works, but for those that want to quickly calculate the recipe nutritional value you can use nutriely recipe builder - https://nutriely.com/recipe-builder