Ask the Community: What’s Your Best Natural Food Dye Recipe?

Photo Credit: The Bake Cakery

Finding natural options for food colorings seemed simple enough in my head, given how frequently I stain my hands, cutting boards, and clothes in vibrant shades of fuscia and yellow with messy recipes gone awry with hibiscus or perhaps curry. But when City Market hosted a winter cookie-decorating party a few weeks ago, the task of creating holiday-hued frostings and glazes proved somewhat of a difficult task.

I Googled, I pinned, I scoured the blogs, and pulled out my old textbooks to find some ideas. I did a few rounds of experimentation and learned a few things that worked and plenty of ones that did not.

What worked really well:

Turmeric – For a brightly pigmented golden yellow, use a small amount of turmeric in your regular glaze or frosting recipe. Because it’s a dry powder and you don’t need more than a ½ tsp. or so for a standard recipe amount, it doesn’t add volume or change the consistency of your recipe. Don’t fret about the flavor—it’s practically undetectable.

Hibiscus—Using about a 1:1 ratio of volume of dried hibiscus to water, you can create a highly pigmented liquid to add to your recipe for a rich pink color. Add the dried hibiscus to boiling water and let it steep for about 10 minutes. Let the liquid cool before adding it into your recipe. Just be sure to use less liquid elsewhere in your recipe or else it will get too runny! You’ll get a great flavor from this method. If you can’t find hibiscus, you can use a couple of bags of tea that has hibiscus in it instead.

What worked ok:

Cabbage – When you boil purple cabbage, the water turns a brilliant blue color. When I added it to frosting, it turned a light lavender/violet. You’ll get a pretty color, but it is certainly a muted color.

Spirulina – Using powdered spirulina, like the turmeric, was easy to incorporate into regular recipes. It had a definite earthy flavor (2 tsp. or so for 1 batch), so I used ½ tsp. lemon extract to cut it. That worked great! The result for me was a light grassy green.

Still looking for:

Help on creating a royal icing! – The natural colorings made my royal icing break apart and take on a spotty look.

Inspiration for more colors! – Let us know—what do you use for natural food colorings? We’d love to hear your ideas! Drop us a line on our Facebook page or tag us in a photo on Instagram!