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Make Bake Decorate: Get Creative With Food Colouring
While baking delicious desserts is an incredible skill, it's a talent in decorating that truly sets your baked creations apart. There are many approaches you can take in adding the perfect finishing touch to your desserts. One of the most common methods is through the use of food colouring to add a pop of colour. Food colouring allows you to unleash your inner artist. With food colouring, you can create colourful cakes, decorate with bright designs and add vibrancy to your baked desserts. We'll take you through the different types of food colouring available here at Spotlight and techniques that will help you master working with food colouring. You can even check out our free and ready to download cake projects for more inspiration on how to use food colouring.
Quick Links
- Types of Food Colouring
- Ways to Use Food Colouring
- How to Remove Food Colouring From Hands
- Cake Decorating With Tigga Mac
- Experiment With Food Colouring By Recreating These Delicious Desserts
Types of Food Colouring
Food colouring is designed to add colour to food or drinks. Available in many forms, you'll most often come across liquid, gel, powder, paste or even paint forms. Let's dive into the different types of food colouring available here at Spotlight.
Liquid Food Colouring
Liquid food colouring is a fluid dye that is incredibly easy to blend into batters, icings and other liquids. It's commonly added by a drop. Because this colouring is a liquid form, it's best to take care when using it to make sure it doesn't imbalance your mixture.
Gel Food Colouring
Stronger than liquid food colouring, gel food colouring is a highly concentrated and thick dye that is suspended in a gel-like base. Producing a more concentrated colour, this form of food colouring is able to achieve deep, intense colours with only a small amount. You can add less gel than you would liquid and get the same result. Gel food colouring is ideal for recipes where too much liquid could ruin your batch.
Powdered Food Colouring
Powdered food colouring is typically oil-based, meaning it mixes beautifully with ingredients like chocolate. In fact, the powder food colour is the dye of choice for tinting chocolates - or any other mixture like meringues where extra moisture from liquid food colouring would destroy the consistency of your treats.
Paint Blend Food Colouring
Designed for adding finer details and colours to baked creations, paint blend food colouring is an edible paint that dries fast with an opaque finish. Compatible for use when decorating fondant, ganache, sugar cookies and macarons, paint blend colouring allows for precise control when decorating and results in a more refined finish. Shop our range of Colour Mill Paint Blends and discover a variety of colours to inspire your next cake decorating endeavour.
Ways to Use Food Colouring
Food colouring helps you achieve a great range of colourful desserts. Brighten up your dessert table by using food colouring to make a variety of sweet treats and decorations, including:
Icing and Fondant
One of the most common uses for food colouring is to colour icing and fondant. You can use liquid food colouring to colour your icing to your preference, but it's also a good idea to use gel colouring for buttercream, icing or fondant for a more intense colour that won't thin the consistency of your icing. Add colour gradually, slowly working your way to your desired colour tone.
Painted Designs
With paint blend food colouring, you can create incredibly artistic decorations on a range of desserts. Simply pour a few drops onto a palette and use a food-safe brush to paint your designs directly onto your dessert. You can even mix our range of Colour Mill Paint Blends to create custom shades for your baked creations.
Layered Cakes
With food colouring, you can create a colourful layered cake, with each tier of your cake produced in a different hue. Start by separating your cake batter into different bowls and adding a few drops to colour the batter. You can use a variety of colours to create a rainbow cake or alter the number of drops added of one colour to create an ombre layering effect. Decorate your cake to conceal the layered design so that only when sliced through will your colourful work of art be revealed.
Coloured Chocolate Treats
Food colouring helps to create a range of desserts, including colourful chocolate sweet treats. Starting off with a melted white chocolate, simply gradually add your food colouring to dye your chocolate into your desired colour tone. Perfect for creating colourful chocolate strawberries or simply colourful chocolate pieces, food colouring is a versatile addition to any baker's kitchen.
How to Remove Food Colouring From Hands
Food colouring is designed to dye your icing, fondant or other ingredients, however, it can often dye your hands too! In learning how to remove food colouring from hands, there are a few different methods you can try:
- Baking soda and vinegar - Two essentials in any kitchen, combining baking soda and vinegar makes for a powerful stain remover. Mix a few tablespoons of baking soda with equal parts of white vinegar. This creates a paste that you can apply to your skin. Allow it to sit for a few minutes and scrub away. Repeat until the stain is gone.
- Non gel, whitening toothpaste - Apply a pea-sized amount of toothpaste to the stain and rub your hands until the food dye is gone. If your toothpaste dries out while rubbing, add some more and continue until the stain is gone.
- Rubbing alcohol - Soak a cotton pad or ball with rubbing alcohol and rub the stain. Repeat with a fresh cotton pad or ball until all the food colouring is removed.
Cake Decorating With Tigga Mac
Talented baker, Tegan Maccormack - also known by her Instagram username @tigga_mac - demonstrated how you can use the Colour Mill Paint Blends to decorate your cakes. To create a colourful, circus themed cake, Tigga first covered the cake in a white fondant to help the paint blends both stick and stand out. She then used six different pastel colours of the Colour Mill Paint Blends, painting the cake with a food safe brush. Leaving to dry overnight, Tigga then completed her cake with some piping for the perfect finishing touch. Check out how Tigga used these Paint Blends to decorate her cake in her Instagram reel.
Experiment With Food Colouring By Recreating These Delicious Desserts
Looking for a colourful dessert to recreate for your next party? Spotlight is home to a collection of free and ready to download cake and confectionery projects that provide helpful instructions, guiding you through creating delicious and decorative desserts. Check out some of our favourite desserts you can recreate with food colouring right here.
Chocolate Covered Cakenuts
Food colouring isn't just for adding icing to your cakes. It can be used for decorating a wide variety of baked creations, including donuts! Our Chocolate Covered Cakenuts recipe is the perfect gateway to decorating with Colour Mill food colouring. Starting by baking a regular cake mix into the shape of donuts, you can use food colouring to create a colourful finishing touch for your homemade donuts. This project involves melting chocolate and adding food colouring to create a colourful topping for your donuts. Dip your donuts into your coloured chocolate, and add sprinkles, lustre dust, or drizzle before the chocolate sets for an added decorative touch!
Rainbow Layer Cake
Creating a layered cake is a great way to showcase both your cake baking and decorating skills. You can go the extra mile with the Rainbow Layer Cake With Ombre Icing project, a cake that allows you to experiment with food colouring in two different ways. Firstly, this recipe involves dividing your cake batter into five different bowls to create five different coloured layers. Once baked and arranged into a tiered cake, this project also involves dividing your buttercream into three different bowls. With one bowl dyed pink, one dyed orange and one a mixture of pink and orange, you can create a gorgeous ombre effect.
Bright Buttercream Cupcakes
Creating colourful icing and buttercream is one of the most common uses of food colouring. Decorate your cupcakes in line with your party theme by using food colouring to match the colour scheme of your party. Our Bright Buttercream Cupcakes project is a great introduction to the world of decorating with food colouring. Perfect for beginner and expert bakers alike, this project takes you through the art of colouring your icing and even provides a helpful tip to use less Colour Mill food colouring to create softer hues, and for brighter tones, to use more. Finish your cupcakes by adding colourful sprinkles. Brighten your next dessert table with these colourful cupcakes!
Elevate Your Cakes With Food Colouring From Spotlight!
With food colouring, you can create joyful and colourful decorations for your desserts. Master the art of food colouring and brighten your dessert table with Spotlight for your next celebration. Perfect for kids' parties, birthdays and other celebrations, food colouring has the power to completely transform your baked creations. Explore Spotlight's variety of food colouring and flavouring, including the incredible range of Colour Mill food colouring, online or at a Spotlight store near you.
Be sure to check out our informative buying guides, where you can find helpful information on topics such as our Guide To Cake Toppings & Decorations and The Ultimate Guide To Cake Decorating Tools.
