Food Coloring: The Best (and Worst) Options

Since we eat with our eyes too, we have to ensure that a cake looks as good as it tastes, and a crucial element to that is the color scheme.

(Image credit: https://www.cakeamigo.com/cakesquad/product/rainbow-cake/?v=f7c7a92a9cb9 )

When I was working on my baking certificate, I remember my instructors were adamant about many things. One of these things was the use of food coloring in our baking. When is it appropriate? When can you get away with just using fruit juice to color the batter? I can't quite remember all the questions, let alone all the answers, but I'll try my best to recite what I do remember.

The Color Should be Consistent With the Flavor

This one's fairly easy to remember. There shouldn't be any dissonance between how food looks and tastes. For example, if your cake or icing is yellow, it's reasonable to expect a lemon or banana flavor. If it tasted like cherry instead, you'd be pretty weirded out. Here are some of my flavor/color rules:

Red: cherry, strawberry

Orange: (obviously)

Yellow: lemon, banana

Green: pistachio, mint, green apple

Blue: blueberry

Purple: grape

Pink: peach, rose, watermelon

Stick to Natural Colors

This was the one my instructors really tried to hammer in. They probably wouldn't be happy with that rainbow cake up there. Their reasoning was "if this color doesn't exist in nature, it shouldn't be in food."

We were encouraged to avoid those bright, technicolor blues, greens, and purples, as they often proved to be unappetizing. After all, if they don't even have any flavoring, all I can think about is the amount of food coloring that must have been poured into the batter to make the cake look like that.

I do find that I'm okay with pale shades of these colors, however, as they give the cake a more natural tone, appearing as if they've been dyed with fruits and other natural ingredients instead of just food coloring.

A boldly colored cake like this would be fine for a kid's birthday party, but personally, I'd take a delicious golden brown cake over a bright blue one any day.

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you learned something!