I’ve been testing food coloring recently, and there are a few brands of natural food coloring that I’ve run across for cake decorating and buttercream icing. Most of them are pretty light, but Supernatural natural food coloring gives you good colors for your cake or cupcake frosting, and would work well for royal icing on cookies, too. I tested the different colors, and this is the way that I figured out to get the brightest colors.
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Supernatural four-color set.
The basic set of Supernatural food coloring is the set of four colors, including yellow, red, blue, and orange.
The colors are powdered colors and are really concentrated, and the instructions say to add them to water to create a liquid food coloring. In this other experiment I tried adding the color directly into the icing, though, because that gave me the best color. If you want a lighter color the liquid will work, but the powder gives you the brightest version.
You can read about the red and green test here: Testing out Supernatural Red and Green
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Yellow natural food coloring.
This yellow is made from beta carotene, so there’s no flavor like there would be from a turmeric-based color.
I added the powder directly to the icing (there was some left in the packet, I didn’t use the entire amount.)
After stirring this for a while, the color was a nice egg yellow, it was more on the orange side than the green side of the spectrum. The powder did dissolve into the icing, though, and it would be fine for using it on cakes or cupcakes. This was only about half a cup of icing, so if you have larger amount of icing it would be less bright than this.
Blue natural food coloring.
The blue color is made from spirulina. It gave me a good sky blue color that was really pretty.
When I opened this packet I didn’t realize that there was some powder in the top of it, so it exploded all over the counter. Be careful with these because it can happen pretty easily!
After mixing it into the icing it was a really pretty blue color, and the powder dissolved really well. This was a bright color without using a lot of the powder.
Red natural food coloring.
I had mixed the red using the red and green set, so that’s where this color came from. It’s made from vegetable juice and beta carotene.
This is a REALLY GOOD natural red food color. If it was in a larger amount of icing it would definitely have been lighter, but if you’re looking for a red that you can pipe onto cupcakes for design details, this was really red, not pink like a lot of the natural food coloring I’ve tried out.
You can see how I mixed this in this video: Red and Green Supernatural Food Coloring
Orange natural food coloring.
The orange was the color that gave me a little trouble when it was being mixed into the icing. It redeemed itself the next day, though. It’s made from beta carotene, like the yellow and red.
I mixed the orange in as a powder, and it took a much longer time to dissolve than the other colors did. I added some water to the icing to see if that would help, but the powder stayed there in tiny little dots, so it didn’t dissolve when I was stirring it in.
The final color was a pale orange, and there were little flecks of color in it that wouldn’t dissolve. This might be the one color that you should add to the water to make sure that it gets mixed in thoroughly.
I figured that it might soften and be mixable when it absorbed moisture from the icing as it sat, and sure enough, the next morning it looked like the little flecks of orange were weeping into the icing around them, so they had absorbed water from the icing and were softened.
I had added the orange to the yellow icing dish, so I mixed it up again, and this final color was a combination of the yellow and orange. This was a good orange color, so if you need this kind of color a combination of the yellow and orange would probably be good. Also, make sure that the orange is completely dissolved into the icing, because the color will intensify once it’s all stirred in.
The final verdict.
These are really good natural food colors…The only thing is that if you add the color into a larger amount of icing, it’s going to be a lot lighter, so it might be better to use this for things like piped designs instead of covering an entire cake. If you like the lighter color that will work, though, so be aware of the amount of icing that you need and go from there.
Also remember that you can mix the icing then let it sit out overnight to soften up any powder color that’s left in the icing and wasn’t dissolved 100%. Stir it again before you use it, and the color will be as intense as it’s going to be.
You can watch me mixing these colors here:
