Homemade Cinnamon Sugar

Made from granulated sugar and ground cinnamon, cinnamon sugar is such an important pantry staple to keep in your cupboards to jazz up cookies and pies and even sprinkle on toast! Learn how to make homemade cinnamon sugar with this easy recipe so you don't have to buy it!

If a recipe calls for cinnamon sugar, don't buy it! It's a huge waste of money. Instead, make your own! You can make a big batch in seconds, store it in jars in your baking pantry for future projects, or give it away as a fun (and easy) homemade gift!

Jump to:

• Ingredients
• Variations
• How to Make it
• How to Use it
• What You Can't Do With It
• 📖 Recipe

Ingredients

The ingredient list to make cinnamon sugar is short. You probably have everything you need in your cupboard so you will never buy cinnamon sugar again!

Variations

While this is a classic, you can use this recipe as a jumping-off point:

• Spices: Try adding cardamom to make cardamom sugar or pumpkin spice mix to make pumpkin spice sugar for your fall baking. There are so many great spices that could work here!
• Sugar: while granulated sugar is the classic, you can try maple or brown sugar. The texture, colour, and flavour will be quite different.

How to Make it

Cinnamon sugar is so easy to make.

That's it! It's even easier to make than lemon sugar, which requires you to work the lemon zest into the sugar to draw out the oils.

Store cinnamon sugar in an airtight container like a Mason jar in a cool, dry place. You can keep this indefinitely, though the cinnamon may become less potent with time.

How to Use it

Now that you have a big jar of it, you might wonder what to do with it. Cinnamon sugar is great for coating baked goods or finishing them.

The easiest thing to make with cinnamon sugar is cinnamon toast. Toast a slice of soft white bread until golden brown, then butter it and sprinkle generously with cinnamon sugar. I like to use salted butter to make the cinnamon toast salty and sweet. It's the perfect breakfast for kids and adults!

Other uses include garnishing the top crust of a pie before baking it to add more flavour. You can also use it to add flavour to pie dough scraps to make pie crust cookies. You can sprinkle it on top of this banana bread without baking soda or a pumpkin loaf cake before baking, or roll freshly baked/fried donuts in cinnamon sugar to coat them. It's an easy way to add something extra to so many recipes.

What You Can't Do With It

You may be tempted to replace cinnamon in a recipe with the same amount of cinnamon sugar, but given that cinnamon is only a fraction of this pantry staple, the rest being mostly sugar, this baking substitution isn't exactly ideal. It's just not a potent source of cinnamon flavour for cake batters and cookies doughs.

If you need to replace cinnamon with cinnamon sugar, there are two steps you may want to consider ideally:

• consider adding double or triple the cinnamon sugar so if the recipe calls for 5 mL (1 teaspoon) of cinnamon, replace it with 15 mL (1 tablespoon) of cinnamon sugar
• add less sugar to your recipe, so pull back on the amount of granulated or brown sugar you are using slightly since cinnamon sugar is mostly sugar. I'd remove 15 mL (1 tablespoon) of sugar from the recipe if you are adding 15 mL (1 tablespoon) of cinnamon sugar.

You could also consider replacing the granulated sugar in your recipe with cinnamon sugar if you've run out of cinnamon. This is another option, depending on how much you have in your pantry.

If you tried this cinnamon sugar recipe (or any other recipe on my website), please leave a ⭐ star rating and let me know how it went in the comments below. I love hearing from you!

📖 Recipe