Natural food coloring doesn’t usually give you a really deep color, especially for red. If you’re making a Christmas cake, you’ll need red and green to pipe on buttercream icing decorations, and using artificial food dyes might seem like the only way. I tested this set of Supernatural natural food coloring to see if it would work, and when I tweaked one part of the instructions, it gave me a really good red color to decorate baked Christmas desserts with colored frosting.
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What’s included in this set?
This set is specifically the red and green, and there are two packets of each color. These are powder food colorings, which are more concentrated than liquids or gels, and they won’t dilute the icing.
The instructions tell you to mix the powder into water to create a liquid food coloring, so that’s what I did to begin with. Since I had two packets of each color I could experiment with mixing the powder directly into the icing later.
How to use these food colorings.
The instructions say to stir one packet of color into 2 tsp of water, so I did that for both colors. Give it time to dissolve the lumps, but if you don’t mix it all in it shouldn’t make a huge difference, since you’ll be adding it into the icing and stirring it then, too.
Add the entire amount to 2 cups of icing, according to the directions. I had about 1/2 cup of icing, so I put in 1/2 tsp of color.
Stir all of the color in well, making sure to scrape the bowl and the spatula to get all of the food coloring off and mixed in. The color that I got from this was more of an orange than red, which is what I expected from a natural red color.
I did the same thing with the green icing and got a nice sage green color, so that was fine.
This was the final color set that I got after mixing it according to the directions. The green was a nice sage green, but the red wasn’t red, it was orange. I decided to add the dry powder directly into the icing to see what would happen.
To see a demo of Watkins natural food coloring, click here.
Add the powder food coloring directly.
I added the entire second packet of food coloring to the icing to see what would happen with that. I figured that the color would activate with the liquid in the icing if I gave it some time, and it wouldn’t dilute the icing if I wasn’t adding any liquid.
This made a huge difference! As I was stirring it the color started to activate, and it turned into a dark red in comparison to the original orange color. This was a huge improvement, and it was a lot darker than the other natural food coloring I’d tested before.
These were the final colors. The green was from the liquid, and the red was from adding much more of the red than the instructions called for, and also in powdered form.
The final colors.
I was pleasantly surprised at the red color that I got from this brand of food coloring, and I would definitely use it to pipe on red details on a Christmas cake or a birthday cake. You would have to use it dry, though, and if you put it into a larger amount of icing the color will be lighter. This is something that’s best used for piping designs, not for covering the whole cake. But the color was really impressive, and I would definitely recommend the Supernatural food coloring brand after testing them out.
You can see a demo of the other Supernatural set here.
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