How to make cake colors from food. How to make natural blue food coloring? How to get blue natural dye

21.05.2019 Beverages

The right dessert pleases the eye and awakens the appetite by its mere appearance - just add a few bright colors. This is where colored creams for cakes without dyes come to the rescue.

From scratch

You can use a variety of products to decorate homemade cakes, pastries, and other pastries. The airy protein cream looks impressive and keeps its shape well. For its preparation, the egg whites are separated from the yolks, a pinch of salt, a little citric acid are added and whipped into a strong foam. Sugar or powdered sugar is gradually introduced into the resulting mass. Various oil creams are very popular. The simplest is prepared from butter with the addition of egg yolks, powdered sugar and water. You can replace eggs with condensed milk, and you get an equally appetizing decoration. A very tasty and quick cream is made from sour cream with a fat content of at least 35%, powdered sugar and vanilla.

How to prepare a cream without dye for decorating a cake, or rather, without synthetic coloring additives? To do this, you need to research the stocks of food available in the kitchen, which will serve as natural dyes for us. Having processed them in a certain way and mixed with cream, you get an original colored cake decoration, delicious and absolutely harmless.

Sun on cake

The bright yellow color can be obtained in a variety of ways. The easiest is to add some fresh carrot juice or raw egg yolk to it. Saffron and turmeric have a rich yellow color. To make a natural dye out of them, you need to thoroughly grind the seasoning, dilute it in water and insist for a day. Then the mixture can be added to the cream. Lemon peel gives an iridescent yellow hue. To do this, grate it finely, wrap it in cheesecloth and squeeze the juice. Buckthorn juice can also be used as a natural coloring agent.

All shades of red

The persistent coloring properties of beets are well known. By adjusting the saturation of its juice, you can easily make an excellent cake without dyes at home, from pink to deep red. To do this, grate a small beet, pour water over it and cook for an hour. To make the color intense and beautiful, add a pinch of citric acid to the broth. Do not forget about all kinds of red berries: raspberries, strawberries, lingonberries, currants, cranberries, dogwood. By the way, preserves, jams and syrups based on them can be used to create creams of red shades with the same success. Cherry and pomegranate juices will do the job just fine. And red wines will give the cake cream not only a pleasant color, but also exquisite aroma and taste notes.

Orange joy

Carrots not only have a rich orange color, but also generously share it with others. To do this, grate it and fry it a little in butter in a 1: 1 ratio. As soon as the carrots are sufficiently softened and the oil turns orange, remove the pan from the stove and let it cool. Next, we shift the resulting mass into cheesecloth and squeeze thoroughly - the natural dye is ready. You can use an orange and color the cream with fresh citrus juice or crushed zest. You can also experiment with the already mentioned yellow and red dyes and mix them with each other.

Sweet coolness

How to make cold color cake cream? Blue and purple hues give the juice of blueberries, blackberries and grapes of rich dark varieties. A decoction of red cabbage leaves will allow you to get light blue shades. Eggplant can be used as a coloring agent. First you need to freeze them a little, carefully cut off the skin and squeeze the juice out of it.

There are many green vegetables, and spinach has the best coloring properties. Pass it through a meat grinder or wrap it in clean cheesecloth and squeeze it out, and you get a natural dye of a gentle green color. Looking for a more intense shade? Squeeze the juice out of the spinach and boil it for half an hour.

Chocolate palette

The easiest way to get a noble brown color is to mix the cream with regular coffee, cocoa powder, or melted chocolate. However, you can resort to a more sophisticated method - with the help of burnt sugar. For this, granulated sugar is diluted in water in a ratio of 5: 1, the mixture is poured into a frying pan and put on a small fire. We maintain the mass on the stove until it acquires a rich brown color. Then we remove it from the heat and pour in a little more water in a thin stream. Then we carefully filter the resulting dye. The main thing is not to overexpose the sugar, otherwise hard lumps will form in it.

As you can see, making a cream without dye for the cake is quite simple. And most importantly, you can do without harmful artificial additives. This decoration will surely please all your household members, especially the little sweets.

Pastries decorated with multi-colored cream are not only pleasing to the eye, but also whet the appetite. Often housewives add artificial colors to the cream, bought in the store.

However, the abuse of non-natural products can negatively affect health.

I suggest making dyes at home using the juice of some plants and other ingredients borrowed from nature.

Today you will learn how to make green cake cream (or blue), and also learn how to make various natural dyes with your own hands.

How to decorate a cake with butter cream

Baking a cake for a significant event is not an easy task. But you can cope with it if you show your imagination and follow the recommendations of the confectionery art guru. First, stock up on the ingredients you need.

50 g of condensed milk (made in accordance with GOST); 0.5 packs of butter (good quality); vanilla - a pinch.

Preparation:

  1. Soften the oil. You can cut it into pieces and leave it at room temperature for 40-50 minutes. Another way, it is faster, involves using a microwave oven, where the oil will be ready in 2-4 minutes.
  2. Using a mixer, beat the softened butter, not forgetting to add the vanillin.
  3. Pour the condensed milk in stages to obtain the desired consistency. It is possible that the declared amount of condensed milk will be too much.

Condensed milk will give sweetness to the cake cream, but you need to work with the shade separately. If you want to give the cream a chocolate color, add cocoa powder.

The intensity of the color depends on the amount of powder, and it is in your power to change it both up and down.

The finished cream can be transferred to a pastry bag with a suitable attachment. But if it is not there, use the means at hand and build something similar.

For example, from a thick plastic bag. It is enough to fill it with cream and then cut off the corner.

You will get a small hole through which you will squeeze out blue or any other colored cream for dessert, making various inscriptions or other elements.

A rotating stand will be a good help in the work. You will not need to be distracted by turning the cake dish in different directions.

With a slight movement of your hand, you can quickly turn the dessert and apply the next element with the cream.

How to decorate a cake with protein cream

Decorations for a protein cream cake look no less beautiful and elegant. The main thing you need to remember is the absolute cleanliness of the dishes and utensils involved in the preparation of the cream.

First things first, separate the whites from the yolks. In order not to spoil the entire batch of eggs, break each unit over a clean cup, and only then pour the protein into a common bowl.

It is advisable to send the proteins to the refrigerator, they whisk better at a low temperature.

Wash the whisk and dishes in which you will whip the cream and pour over boiling water.

The slightest traces of fat will not allow you to achieve splendor, which means that your efforts will be in vain. Drops of water on the dishes are also unacceptable; after processing, carefully wipe the bowl and whisk with a paper towel.

In the process of whipping, add a pinch of salt and soda to the whites. This will save both time and energy. Plus, citric acid will make the mixture less sugary.

You can decorate the dessert with snow-white protein cream, it will look festive and elegant. Some confectioners prefer to paint the mass, because flowers in the natural environment are found in the most incredible shades.

What natural dyes can be made from at home

Taking into account consumer demand, professional pastry chefs decorate desserts with cream roses and inscriptions in different colors.

Housewives can use store-bought blue dye in their kitchens. But is it so safe for health?

Let's turn to the experience of our grandmothers who managed to make dyes from available products. How and from what they did it, we will now figure it out.

The easiest and easiest way to color the cream is to add the boiled juice of some vegetables, berries or fruits to it.

It is known that the green color is obtained due to the presence of spinach juice, orange - carrots. Beets give red and turmeric gives yellow.

By combining colors with each other, you can get other shades. For example, by combining yellow and green dyes, you get a blue tint, which is also often used when decorating desserts.

Remember, beets will not give the cream a bright red color. Even if you boil it and mix the broth with a small amount of vinegar or citric acid, the result will be a brown hue or fuchsia color.

Finely chop the carrots before use and sauté for a few minutes in butter. After rubbing the mass through a sieve, add to the cream, and you will get a carrot-colored decoration.

A rich orange hue will give you more likely not carrots, but orange peel. You will be convinced of this when you rub a piece of sugar on the peel of this citrus.

Sugar crystals quickly absorb flavors and any color. Experiment with lemon, lime, and you will see how the sugar takes on a new color. By the way, orange color can be achieved using apricot boiled in syrup.

Turmeric, or rather its saturated aqueous solution, will make the cream not bright yellow, it will have a greenish tint.

If the decoration needs to be given a yellow sunny color, use saffron. An alternative to saffron would be sea buckthorn or pumpkin.

A red or deep pink color is obtained from fresh or frozen raspberries, cranberries or lingonberries.

Strawberries, despite their bright color, will give the cream an ugly brownish-red hue. Cherry juice mixed with cream will give it a cool red, with a purple tint, color scheme.

If you need a deep purple, inky rich dye, use blackberries.

And add blackcurrant syrup to the protein mass before baking, the result is a pale blue meringue.

A couple of drops of syrup will be enough to give the dessert a pleasant color. The saturation of the hue depends on the amount of dye, adding more than usual, you get a blue color.

Blueberries and blueberries will give you purple or cold lilac.

A delicate creamy shade is obtained by adding tomato paste. If you increase its concentration, the decoration from the cream will acquire a delicate orange tint.

Fear not, the dessert will not taste like tomatoes, the amount of dye is too small to affect anything other than color.

A hint of spring green will be presented by spinach, it is the leader among green natural dyes. It has a neutral taste, which means that your dessert, like before decorating with cream, will be sweet and thin out the vanilla aroma. Alternatives to spinach are tarragon (tarragon) and mint leaves.

Brown dye is cocoa powder, melted chocolate and saturated coffee solution (it can be either instant or ground).

How to make dyes at home

Syrups from various berries can be cooked in advance and kept in the refrigerator in a well-sealed container. If necessary, use to give the desired shade.

Frozen products are also used. You just need to defrost the berries, cover them with sugar (in a 1: 1 ratio) and boil them over low heat. Strain the mass.

Rinse and chop the spinach. Pour in a little water and blanch for 5 minutes over low heat. Strain the green solution.

Peel and cut the beets. Boil 15-18 minutes in water and add a few crystals of citric acid. Use a strained solution.

You do not need to cook mint and tarragon, otherwise they will acquire a brown tint. First, prepare hot sugar syrup, add chopped herb to it and let it brew.

Chop pumpkin, as well as carrots, before use and sauté in butter.

When can natural colors be added?

Pumpkin, carrot and saffron dye should not be added to the dough before baking (this does not apply to meringues and macaroons.

It is better to soak the finished cakes with syrup so that the dessert acquires the desired shade (green, blue, pink, red and others).

Natural colors are not added to the cream before whipping as they do not aid the process. Add them at the very end and in the amount necessary to obtain the desired shade.

Multi-colored dough for dumplings, ravioli are prepared with dyes previously dissolved in water. This is necessary for even distribution throughout the mass.

My video recipe

Dyes from natural ingredients. How to make them correctly and how to use them in everyday life?

Cakes, pastries, marmalade and other goodies look, of course, very beautiful and appetizing in tandem with bright synthetic dyes, but this is harmful and even dangerous to health. Natural dyes can come in handy anywhere. Children's cakes are often made of them, on which various figures of cartoon characters made of mastic flaunt on top.

Dyes of this kind are also used to create finger paints for children; they can also be painted by adults who are allergic to the components of ordinary paints. In our article, we will talk about how you can make dyes at home that will not only give a beautiful shade to food products, but also make them more useful. And children's creativity with such dyes will turn into a safe and useful game.

How to make natural food coloring, natural red color

The leading role of all products with a red tint is taken by beets. From this vegetable widespread in our country, you can get natural and useful dyes from a delicate pink hue to a rich crimson color.

The dye based on this bright root vegetable is prepared according to several recipes. We will tell you about the method of boiling dye from beets, and also tell you about an express way to get the desired color from the beetroot mass.

So, first, let's talk about a quick way to get red paint. To do this, a blender will rush to your aid. Just toss a couple of small beets into the bowl of this miracle food processor. But first, wash the vegetable diligently. You can use a metal sponge for this purpose, with it you can perfectly wash the beets.

Cut the washed beets into small pieces with a knife. Pour half a glass of clean water to the beets in a blender. Then turn on the blender and grind the root vegetables into almost puree. Then transfer the gruel to cheesecloth and squeeze out the juice. Here you have a biologically pure dye, congratulations!

Now let's talk about the second method of getting dye from beets. First, wash the root vegetable and peel it off. Then prepare a grater and coarsely grate the beets. After this manipulation, move the beet mass into a saucepan and fill it with water so that the beets are just hiding there.

Now start cooking the dye vegetable. In this case, the fire should be small. Make sure the lid on the saucepan is tightly closed. Boil the beets for an hour. To prevent the dye from becoming less bright, throw half a teaspoon of "lemon" into a saucepan during cooking.

After an hour has passed, turn off the heat, and open the lid on the saucepan. Let the dye cool, and then use it as directed. The cake can be separated from the beets with cheesecloth or a strainer.

Another red eco dye can be obtained from berries such as raspberries, cranberries, cherries, and so on. Pomegranate juice can also be an excellent coloring agent. These products do not need to be cooked. With him, the situation is simpler. Just squeeze out the juice and start coloring.

Be careful. In the process of extracting juice from beets, pomegranates or berries, you can get your hands so dirty that it will be unrealistic to wash them with simple soap and water. Therefore, we recommend using ordinary thin rubber gloves as protective clothing. They can often be found in the hands of chefs.

If your hands are nevertheless dirty, and now you need to wash them urgently, resort to the help of citric acid. Just dissolve a bag of "lemons" in a deep bowl of hot water, and then dip your pens there. You will see that the beetroot juice will wash off quickly.

How to make green food coloring

Spinach is the king of biologically pure green dyes. With it, you can get both a rich green color and a delicate color of young grass.

If you want to color the food in a light green color, reminiscent of spring greens, then squeezing juice from the spinach will be enough. To do this, rinse the spinach leaves and rotate them in a meat grinder. Then fold it back onto cheesecloth, substitute a plate for collecting juice from below and press harder. The juice will flow instantly. It is completely ready to use it in the kitchen.

If you want to achieve a rich green color, then you need to boil this juice along with chopped spinach. To do this, transfer the green mass twisted in a meat grinder to a saucepan or large iron mug and put on low heat. Boil it down for about 40 minutes. You will see how the juice gradually begins to become more intense in color. Then cool it down, strain through a fine sieve or gauze cloth and use in cooking.

How to make blue food coloring

If you already have other natural food colors in your arsenal, then blue can be obtained by mixing green and red. Yes, yes, the very ones that we made from beets and spinach. If there are none, then go to the store for red cabbage, and then start creating blue eco paint in your kitchen.

An excellent blue color can be obtained from red cabbage. Chop it or just cut it into pieces. Then put in a saucepan and pour water there. Do not pour too much liquid. Just allow a light coating of the cabbage with water.

Boil the vegetable for half an hour. If you open the cap after 30 minutes, you will see that the water turns blue. If you want to achieve a richer shade, throw a spoonful of baking soda into the water, the water will immediately become brighter. Hold the cabbage in water until it cools completely, and then drain the resulting natural paint into a separate container to use it later for any purpose.

If you want blue with a shade of purple, then ordinary eggplant will come to the rescue. Finding him on supermarket shelves is not a problem at all. First, put the "little blue friend" from the garden in the freezer. Let him lie there for about half an hour.

Then remove the peel-like “clothes” from the vegetable. Then transfer these eggplant crusts to a blender and turn into gruel. And after this operation, squeeze the juice out of them using gauze.

Another blue-purple hue can be given by blueberries. It's good if you wanted to get such a dye in the summer, during the ripening period of this dye berry. Take half a glass of fresh berries and mix with a quarter glass of water. Then rub thoroughly with a fork to get a homogeneous gruel.

After that, it is better to put gloves on your hands so that the skin does not turn blue. Blueberry juice is very difficult to wash from hands, and it is unlikely to be washed off clothes at all. So, armed with protective seals, move the blueberry gruel onto cheesecloth and squeeze the juice with pressing movements.

How to make black food coloring

In the process of preparing, say, a children's cake, you cannot do without black paint. For example, when creating characters from a cartoon on a cake, the chef draws eyes, a nose and some items of clothing with black paint. For boys, soccer ball cakes are often made. Of course, even here you cannot do without black natural dye.

Cocoa acts as a black coloring pigment among the products. But do not think that this is a common variety of this drink. You should buy only special cocoa, “Dutch Ultra” variety. This cocoa has a darker color compared to its congeners. The dye from such cocoa turns out to be black.

To obtain the desired shade, simply mix a couple of tablespoons of cocoa with a little water and heat. And then the cooled mixture can be used to paint something. Black can also be obtained from cuttlefish ink, but in this case, the salty taste of this biological dye will be transferred to the dish.

How to make yellow food coloring

A spice called turmeric can help give dough, cream, or anything else a yellow color. It can be found on store shelves, packaged in sachets. This spice has a tangy taste with hints of orange.

To prepare eco dye, mix a tablespoon of this colorful spice with a glass of water. Then put this mixture on fire and boil for a couple of minutes. Then leave it to cool. When the mixture becomes cold, you can use it as directed.

Remember that turmeric "likes" to color the wrong thing. For example, clothing, skin, furniture, floor and so on can suffer from it. Everything that comes into contact with this miracle spice is painted in a sunny color. Therefore, take precautions when working with such a natural dye. It is also worth noting that such a dye is stored in the refrigerator, in a closed jar for no more than 15 days.

A delicate yellow hue can be obtained from citrus. Or rather, you need a lemon for this purpose. Take a large fruit and rinse it under running warm water. Then prepare a grater with small holes. Rub the lemon zest, then place it on cheesecloth and squeeze out the juice. You will end up with a fragrant and very delicate, sunny shade of yellow.

There is another option for extracting a yellow natural dye. This time saffron will be used. Just chop it with a knife or with a blender. then pour in a small amount = m of vodka and put in a dark place for a day. It is best to choose a glass jar with a tight lid as a container.

As the day passes, remove the jar and strain the mixture in it. Then use this yellow tincture for cooking or coloring anything of your choice. Vodka will add spicy taste and delicate aroma to dishes. For children's paints, of course, it is better not to use such a dye, but replace it with a non-alcoholic version.

How to make blue food coloring

Natural food-grade blue dye can be obtained by diluting the blue dye from red cabbage with milk. Just add a few tablespoons of milk to the juice obtained from boiling cabbage.

Adjust the intensity to your liking. If you want a deep blue. then do not pour a lot of milk, and if you need a slightly bluish shade, then pour in more milk.

How to use natural food colors:

In the business of coloring food and creating cakes with homemade dyes, you need to know certain subtleties.

for cream

If you are using natural eco dye as a cream coloring, then add the dye at the end of cooking. Do not add color before whisking. Otherwise, you will not be able to achieve the desired consistency from the cream. During whipping, the dye can only interfere.

Do not put a lot of dye at once in order to achieve a rich cream color. As soon as you beat the cream, add a little coloring liquid, mix gently and see what color the product turns out to be. Basically, a few drops of food paint are enough to make the cream “dress” in the shade you want.

for meringue

If you are preparing meringues, then pour in the dye also last and very carefully. Note that meringues are rarely dyed, and in white it just asks for a mouthful. If we warned that you need to be more careful with the cream so as not to harm the consistency, then you need to be even more careful with the meringue. An extra drop of liquid can play against a beautiful and mouth-watering meringue.

Whisk the protein and sugar first. Usually taken for every 50 grams of sugar 1 large egg white. Remember that sugar must be added gradually so that the meringue turns out to be tender and fluffy, without sugar crystals in its composition. At the end of cooking, when you no longer feel sugar on your teeth, you can add dye, but very carefully. A drop of paint will suffice.

for biscuit

If you bake the cake yourself and want to decorate the cakes for it, then it is better to do this when the cake is already removed from the oven, and not at the time of kneading the dough. This is especially true for various intense colors such as red, blue, green. But yellow or brown can be added to the dough during the kneading process.

Often cocoa is added to the dough when kneading to make the cake brown. According to the recipe, this is done when baking a Zebra cake. In one part of the dough in this recipe, cocoa is put, and in the other, nothing is added and it remains white.

Then one piece is poured into the baking sheet one by one, then the second part of the dough and circles are drawn on the surface of the dough with a fork or knife. As a result, you will have a beautiful striped cake.

Using natural food colors in painting

Natural dyes are widely used in art. For example, finger paints for children's creativity are often made on the basis of home dyes. They differ from purchased ones in that they can be eaten. Agree, after all, small children pull everything into their mouths to try by mouth. You can paint with finger paints from 6 months, as soon as the baby begins to sit.

With such natural paints, you will be calm about the health of your child. Even if in the process of his creative impulse he tastes paints, this will not harm his health in any way, because there is no chemistry there. On the contrary, if you choose colors taking into account the child's eating habits, you can get 2 in 1, that is, a full-fledged snack or afternoon snack, and satisfying the baby's creative needs.

And how well such activities affect the mental abilities of the baby! Finger drawing gives a child the opportunity to develop both hemispheres of their brain. As a result, you will grow up a very smart and creative child who will strive for new knowledge and skills. This is very important in the modern world.

You can take any dyes for finger paints. You already have them to cook. Now the case is behind the basis for such paints.

To prepare eco paints, you need the following:

  • Plain wheat flour - 2 cups
  • Salt - 5 tbsp l.
  • Sunflower vegetable oil - 2 tbsp. l.
  • Water - 200 ml
  • Eco food colors - at your discretion

The components for finger paints just need to be mixed together. Pour water into flour, rather than vice versa, to avoid the formation of a large number of lumps. It is better to take cold water.

After you mix all the ingredients (except for the dyes) in one container, put the resulting mixture in jars that have lids. For this purpose, you can use jars of gouache, if any, or jars of baby puree or a hundred more like that.

After that, start adding dyes. We described how to do them a little higher. Then mix the base thoroughly so that the dye covers it completely. Store paints in the refrigerator with the lid tightly closed.

It is better not to store such paints longer than 2-3 days. This can lead to the formation of harmful organisms inside the paints, and they can dry out. If possible, make new finger paints every time so that the baby receives only fresh food.

Note that a child can draw on paper with a finger with simple tomato paste or spinach gruel. And if you give him peeled carrots, then they will also leave traces of themselves on paper. Berry gruel is also good for drawing. In addition, it is very tasty and healthy.

Now you know how to make natural eco dyes in your kitchen, which can be used not only for preparing a wide variety of culinary masterpieces, but also for creativity.

Nowadays elastic mastic is extremely indispensable in creating true confectionery masterpieces. With its help, cakes are decorated, figurines are made for decorating all kinds of cakes. But the mastic itself looks very boring and uninteresting. It looks like white plasticine, only sweet and edible. Products from such a product will come out monotonous and faded. The dyes for sweet mastic, which can be both natural and synthetic, will add the missing beauty and brightness to the cake.

What dyes are there?

Dyes can be liquid, gel and dry:

  • ... Liquid coloring agents. With their help, confectionery creams and rice protein mass are dyed. These tools can be used anywhere.
  • ... Dry dyes for mastic. Produced in powder form. With their help, you can give the desired shade to any confectionery product. Diluted in boiled water or alcohol.
  • ... Gel dyes. In some ways, they are similar to liquid dyes. They are concentrated, which allows them to be used extremely economically and dosed. Various creams and glaze are stained with such means. Often times, the paint is added directly to the dough to add a touch of flavor.

Some people are afraid to use synthetic paint for fear of harm to health. These fears and doubts are unfounded. If doubts persist, you can prepare food coloring for mastic at home from affordable and inexpensive products. Preparing natural dyes for elastic mastic is not at all difficult.

Cooking food paint yourself

A yellow or brown tint will come out of the burnt, which is extremely easy to prepare.

  1. To do this, five parts of granulated sugar are poured into a deep bowl and one part of water is poured in, the container is put on a small fire and boiled until a thick mass of a beautiful dark brown color is formed.
  2. Next, remove the pan from the stove and add water in small portions, stirring constantly.
  3. The resulting solution must be filtered.
  4. For a yellow hue, you can use chopped saffron. It is poured with warm water for a day, after which it is filtered.

Brown can be sourced from chocolate or strong coffee. Depending on how the required dye is added to the mastic, the result will be obtained.

From beets, you can get a delicate pink and rich red color. Depending on the concentration of the juice, this or that tone will be obtained. Rub the beets on the largest grater, transfer it to a container and fill it with water, cover with a lid and boil for at least an hour. After that, the liquid must be drained, and the beet pulp must be squeezed out.

A pinch of citric acid is added to this solution, so the solution will remain bright and saturated. No less beautiful shades of red can be obtained by boiling the juices of any red berries. Making dyes to give different shades to mastic at home is a snap.

Orange color will give juicy carrots, grated on a coarse grater and fried in butter. The oil will not burn at all if you first grease the pan with vegetable oil. After about five minutes, the carrots will become soft and can be removed from the heat. The slightly cooled mass is wrung out through double gauze or thick cloth.

Spinach will serve as a source of green shades. It is passed through a press or crushed with a blender, then wrapped in cloth and squeezed. A more intense tone will turn out if you boil spinach juice over low heat for about forty minutes.

Purple and lilac dyes will produce blueberries and grapes.

Color mix

But what if you want to create something special, and there are too few available shades in stock? How can you replace the dyes for mastic to get a new color? You can get the desired color by combining certain means:

  • ... yellow + blue = green
  • ... green + black = dark green
  • ... yellow + lilac = light green
  • ... yellow + green + white = light green
  • ... red + green = marsh green
  • ... lilac + pink = lavender
  • ... green + yellow + orange = blue
  • ... red + purple = plum
  • ... red + yellow + blue = burgundy
  • ... white + red = pink
  • ... yellow + orange = peach
  • ... yellow + red = orange
  • ... white + green + yellow = lemon
  • ... yellow + red + white = beige
  • ... brown + orange = terracotta

Secrets of making paints

For many home cooks, it remains a mystery how you can paint the mastic with dry dyes so as not to spoil the elastic mass. Even an inexperienced pastry chef can cope with such a task, if you use food dyes for elastic mastic in your work.

Only a drop of gel dye is required. The paint is added directly to the material and vigorously mixed until a homogeneous plastic mass is obtained. It is necessary to mix very intensively and quickly, otherwise the mass will harden and the color will be distributed quite unevenly.

When using dry products, you can paint the mass in two ways. In the first case, an ordinary toothpick is taken and immersed in a dry dye, and then into the mass itself. This is done several times, and then the mastic is mixed. Knead until the color is evenly distributed.

In the second case, very little dry paint is placed in some container. Just a teaspoon of paint is enough. Drop 3 drops of water or lemon juice into the container, then mix well. Place this mixture directly into the mastic dough and stir vigorously. Now you know how to make elastic mastic dye quickly and easily.

Of course, this is a personal matter for everyone, which dyes for mastic are better to use: homemade or synthetic. It is important to remember only one thing, that you cannot save on your own health, so you need to choose the best. If you choose synthetic dye for mastic for the cake, read carefully the composition on the package. And if you prefer to make homemade dyes for plastic mastic with your own hands, use the ripe and freshest products for this purpose.

There is a wide range of synthetic colors on the shelves that help create rich colors in desserts.

It is very easy to work with coloring compositions of synthetic origin, they are stored for a long time, and do not deteriorate under the influence of external factors (humidity, sunlight and temperatures of different indicators).

Still, if you prefer to use exclusively natural compounds as dyes, even if you get a faded color, but 100% there will be no allergic reaction in children, then you should learn how to cook them from various natural products familiar to the body.

Naturally occurring dyes are physically isolated from animal and plant sources. In fact, such coloring compositions are not subjected to chemical modification, only in exceptional cases, when it is necessary to preserve the product for a longer time (under factory production conditions). Roots, leaves, and other plant products are often used as raw materials for obtaining natural food coloring.

In mass production conditions, dyes of natural origin are produced in the form of granules, powders, liquids or oils.

The brightness of the coloring formulations in such a production process depends on the time of the year of the collection of products, the conditions of its growth, and other things. The main advantage of coloring compositions of natural origin is the factor that it is permissible to prepare them yourself at home. Take a look around, because surely in the refrigerator or on the shelves in the pantry, you will find a whole set of everything you need.

Natural dyes: a list of basic colors

For coloring culinary products with natural food compositions, the basic colors are used: yellow, red and blue. Yes, they are not as bright and rich as products of synthetic origin, but they are clearly safer for the human, and especially the child's body.

The biscuits are baked like regular biscuit bases until tender. And we get such beautiful ones.

Now let's take a closer look at the origin of each natural color:

Preparing food coloring is very simple: a finely chopped selected ingredient is poured with acidified water in a small amount. The mass is put on fire and brought to a boil, after which the composition is filtered. Another option for extracting red juice: the product is finely rubbed or kneaded in a mortar, filtered from the pulp.

Pure blue is obtained from indigo paste mixed with starch. On the scale of food production, Indigocarmine paste (black-bluish color) is used, which forms a pure blue solution. The indigoid dye is isolated from certain types of molluscs.

Although orange colors for coloring culinary products can be obtained from a number of products, both familiar and familiar to us, and inaccessible ones. Consider all types of ingredients shown in the photo, you will recognize each of them, only not everyone will have to find on the shelves of retail outlets.

When visiting creative culinary inspiration, you can experiment and try to make new color schemes for coloring desserts.