My grandma’s pumpkin roll recipe with less sugar, lighter cream cheese (Neufchâtel), and fewer calories is just what you need for your holiday table! You can even make it with gluten free flour. A few slight alterations make this easy pumpkin roll recipe healthier and lighter, but it tastes just as good as the original!

One thing I love about this pumpkin roll recipe is that it’s not overly sweet. I love desserts, but if they are too sugary-sweet they aren’t quite as enjoyable. Am I the only one?

This healthy pumpkin roll satisfies my sweet tooth and pumpkin craving in the best way!

Recipe updated on November 19, 2025

My History with Pumpkin Roll

Pumpkin roll and I go way back. This is my Grandma Trisha’s prized dessert at every childhood Thanksgiving meal, when everyone made a beeline for her plate of pumpkin goodness.

Normally, I don’t waste my dessert calories on anything but chocolate. I choose chocolate every single time when given an option – with the exception of pumpkin roll. It is heaven, and the thing I look forward to most at holiday dinners!

While living in Scotland during the holiday season, I was determined that we would have pumpkin roll, no matter what kind of scavenger hunt I’d have to go on to find the ingredients. I knew pumpkin wasn’t super easy to find there, since Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated.

Alas, I still underestimated the lengths I’d have to go to in order to have pumpkin roll on my holiday table.

First, the pumpkin. There wasn’t any canned. So we bought a large pumpkin, roasted it, and pureed it. It was a little less concentrated and dense than canned pumpkin, but did the job adequately.

Next hurdle: the jelly roll pan. This is crucial for the perfect pumpkin roll. I wasn’t worried – I had brought mine (a gift from my Grandma) all the way from the States, so I knew all would be well.

Wrong.

What I hadn’t considered was the size of my teensy British oven. I should have realized this, since we downgraded from a full-size turkey to a small chicken (the turkey wouldn’t fit).

But after the arduous task of roasting/pureeing pumpkin, mixing up the pumpkin roll cake batter, carefully pouring it into my prized jelly roll pan, and placing it into the oven, I was shocked when the oven door wouldn’t shut.

Our taste of home, it seemed, would not be.

But, my husband (king of ingenuity) came to the rescue. That Thanksgiving, I was particularly thankful for him. He took out the inner glass panel of the double-paneled oven door, which helped it *almost* shut. He sealed the crack with a rolled up towel saturated with water to keep the heat in.

The pumpkin roll we worked so hard for that day tasted sweeter than ever!

Oh, the lengths we go to for our tradition-keeping.

This season, start a new tradition with this mouthwatering, easy pumpkin roll that a little less heavy and sugary. It’s classic pumpkin roll, but lighter. 

When I set out to make a healthy version of the traditional pumpkin roll loaded with powdered sugar, I had a few doubts about the end result. I must say, I’m pretty proud of this recipe and the way it turned out. It’s just as good as the original, really!

More pumpkin recipes to try:

• Cream Cheese Filled Pumpkin Bread
• Fresh Milled Pumpkin Muffins with Cream Cheese Frosting
• Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins (sweetened with applesauce)
• Pumpkin Pie Smoothie (Vegan & Paleo)

This post is sponsored by Wheat Montana Farms & Bakery.

Healthy Pumpkin Roll Ingredient Swaps

Check out the ingredients I swapped to make this recipe healthier without sacrificing flavor.

• Half coconut sugar and half organic granulated sugar sweeten this pumpkin roll perfectly. No refined white granulated sugar needed! But, you can absolutely use regular granulated sugar if you prefer. Here’s the nutritional rundown: “Coconut sugar has a much lower glycemic index than white sugar. It means that it won’t make your blood sugar spike, like normal sugar does. It’s also a bit more nutritious. When white sugar basically provides empty calories, coconut sugar contains a small amount of minerals like zinc, iron, calcium and potassium (1).”
• Homemade powdered coconut sugar (made with coconut sugar and a bit of cornstarch processed in my high speed blender) only took a couple of minutes to make! And it’s so much healthier than powdered white sugar from the grocery store. Here’s the easy recipe from Whole New Mom (I used coconut sugar instead of xylitol).
• Neufchâtel cheese is a soft cheese very similar to cream cheese, but a little less heavy and fattening. (It has 70 calories per serving as opposed to 90.) Find it right next to the cream cheese in the dairy aisle. You can still use regular cream cheese if you like – I tried both with success.
• Maple syrup is the perfect way to sweeten the creamy filling without (again) all that yucky powdered sugar! Here are some of the benefits of maple syrup.
• Non-GMO, Prairie Gold White Wheat flour from Wheat Montana instead of all-purpose flour! I’m literally obsessed with this flour. It is 100% whole grain, but it’s finely ground which gives it a light and sweet taste almost identical to regular all-purpose. If your family is gluten-free, you can also sub your favorite gluten-free flour blend.

I highly recommend using the Wheat Montana Prairie Gold flour for this recipe. Made from hard white spring wheat, it’s more nutritious because it’s milled on-site with a natural process that captures the wheat’s nutritional value. Wheat Montana has their wheat certified chemical-free by an independent lab.

I love this flour for baking things like Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Muffins and Homemade Buttermilk Biscuits.

You can find it at many TJ Maxx, Ross, and Marshall’s locations, as well as Sprouts and Dutch Valley Foods. It’s also available at many Wal-Mart stores. If yours doesn’t carry it currently, just ask and they should be able to ship it since it’s in the Wal-Mart system. You can also find it on Amazon.

Healthy Pumpkin Roll Baking Tips & Tricks

You’ll find the full recipe below, but I just wanted to give you a few tips and tricks to make your pumpkin roll recipe simple and easy.

• Make sure to grease the jelly roll pan, add wax or parchment paper, plus grease and flour the paper! This will make removing your cake from the pan so much easier. (Here’s the kind of pan I use.)
• Dust your thin kitchen towel thoroughly with the homemade powdered sugar so the cake doesn’t stick. You can also use flour, if you wish.
• Use 100% pure pumpkin, NOT pumpkin pie filling (this has extra sweeteners and additives). I like Libby’s.
• When you’re ready to turn your cake onto the towel, loosen the wax paper from the pan first. Gently peel off the paper.
• For this recipe, I used half coconut sugar and half organic granulated. I also made another roll with granulated only. You could also try 100% coconut sugar. I decided to mix the two so the final result would be very close to the original recipe. If you use coconut sugar, you may want to pulse it in the food processor or blender for a few seconds if it’s really grainy.
• Make sure your cake and filling are thoroughly cooled before attempting to fill and roll. It will make for a prettier final result and reduce cracking.
• For aesthetic purposes, you can add a final dusting of homemade powdered sugar before serving. Garnish with your favorite fruit, too! I chose pomegranate.
• Pumpkin roll can be wrapped in a layer of plastic wrap and a layer of aluminum foil and frozen for up to one month. It’s actually really easy to slice straight from the freezer! For best results, thaw 24 hours before slicing and serving.

A note on rolling the cake

Many pumpkin roll methods involve dumping the cake on a powdered sugar dusted towel, rolling, and refrigerating to cool before adding the filling. My new favorite method skips this step.

All you have to do is roll up the cake directly in the parchment paper you baked it in. Then remove from the fridge, spread on the filling, and re-roll the cake. But this is important: you need to be a little more careful as you re-roll. It can be a tad more tricky to smoothly peel off the paper as you roll, so take your time. Use whichever method you prefer.

If you enjoyed this recipe, please leave a star recipe rating and a comment telling me how it went!