Natural red food color: TruColor Red Annatto

You know how much I love TruColor products. I use them a lot and I post pictures of the cookies I make with them. When TruColor came out with the liquid colors they sent me a set and they also added a jar of their Red Annatto Airbrush color. They told me it was amazing and I had to try it. I made a mental note about it and put the jar to my stash to try it when I get a chance.

Last week I needed some red hearts for a project and I had the idea to try Red Annatto in my red coating instead of Americolor gel. I was prepared to see my mixture turn purple, as this is what most natural red colors do in my alkaline food environments (like eggs, icing...). But this color is red, very nice, strong, vibrant red and it stays red whatever I do with it!!!

Now, I hate myself for not trying it right away when I got it!

So here is the red heart colored with this new natural food color. From now on, I can let my kids eat my red cookies!

I was so excited about my new, gorgeous red coating, that I forgot to put my gloves on when I painted this cookie. And you know how your hand looks like after working with red food color, right? Here comes the next surprise: this color came off my hands with a simple hand wash.

I loved this vibrant red so much, that I could not stop, so here is another set of red hearts:

I have to tell you, I couldn't stop here. I had to try to color my icing with it. I know, the label says "airbrush", but who cares? And I am so glad I did! Look at this gorgeous red palette! And I did not have to use a lot of the powder to get this vibrant color. The pink shades are the same red with more icing added.

Here is a square cookie with the four shades of Red Annatto:

 I also made 4 small squares with the 4 shades:

I will definitely need to try it as an airbrush color, but I don't use airbrush a whole lot. So this will take me a little more time. If you need a jar of Red Annatto you can get it at my Etsy shop. Oh, did I tell you that I re-opened my Etsy shop with some cool supplies?

WARNING: This color is not suitable for nut allergy sufferers!

Try this color, you will love it!

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TruColor Color Guide 2 - Airbrush Shine: Metallic Reserve Collection

Read this post at the new blog.

TruColor Color Guide 1 - Airbrush Shine: Metallic Paint Collection

Read this pot at the new blog.

Flowers and small hearts decorated using TruColor gel food colors

 

As a mother of three, I always try to use natural ingredients in my kitchen. For a long time this was not a real option when it came to food coloring. I am thrilled, that with TruColor now we have the opportunity to create colorful AND healthy treats.

I have used their airbrush colors a lot, as it is so easy to just paint on the cookies. But I did not really use the gels until now. Mixing the icing colors is a lot of work by itself and it just felt overwhelming to add the extra step of hydrating the colors first. But I decided to get over my fear and get familiar with this product as well. And it was actually easier than I thought.

I used the smallest mixing bowl I had. First, I put a little color powder in the bowl and mixed it with a few drops of distilled water. When the color dissolved I added some icing. Then adjusted the consistency by adding a little confectioners sugar or water as needed. (But this is a step I always do for each bag when bagging icing). Look at this gorgeous, vibrant palette:

I don't know if it's just because of knowing that they are natural and healthy, but I always find my TruColor color palettes very beautiful and live. Somehow, I always love them more that my synthetic palettes. What do you think?

You can follow below how the cookies were made:

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Roman Cross Cookies

I like to decorate cross cookies. You have seen some with traditional piping in February, one with purple flowers and others with stained glass design around Easter. This time I used TruColor natural food colors and traditional white piping to decorate these roman cross shapes.

First I outlined the cookies.

 Then flooded with white icing.

When it dried I simply painted them with the gorgeous TruColor airbrush colors.

The decoration is simple white icing.

Visit Cookie Cutter Kingdom for this cutter and get 10% off with coupon code FRIENDSOFTUNDE.
Here is a list of the places selling TruColor natural food colors.

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Mommy Mission - Healthier Easter Cookies, TruColor Natural Food Colors 2

Being a sugar artist and a health conscious mother at the same time is not easy. But I try to do my best. This project is part of the mission.

I have an easy start as my favorite gingerbread recipe is already healthier than the traditional sugar cookies. It has just a little sugar, the rest is honey and one cookie has about 75 calories (while a sugar cookie can be anywhere between 150 and 250, depending on the recipe).

The tough part is the decoration. I usually use royal icing and color it with Americolor gel food colors. They come in gorgeous colors, they are affordable and easy to use. But they are artificial food colors, so I do not let my kids eat it. I do let them eat some colored food, but my cookies are laying around 365 days a year and that would add up in their bodies way too much. So they had to accept this general rule: no colored cookies for them.

However, as all kids, they love colorful things. Fortunately there is a healthy option! I can use Tru Color natural food colors. They are too pricey for me to use for keepsake and presentation cookies, but they come in beautiful vibrant colors. So this is the perfect solution for my project.

Now, the icing... Around Easter my kids eat way to much sugar with all the egg hunts and parties. So I just decided to skip icing. And here is what I came up with:

I chose five happy colors from the Tru Color standard metallic collection. They are really shiny and could be painted on icing as well. But now I am doing something different.

As they contain no preservatives, these colors come in powder form and have to be diluted before use. I took out a little of each color to a paint palette.

Added some distilled water to them and mixed well with a toothpick.

Then I added corn syrup to the colors. It's clear, will dry hard and helps to distribute the paint evenly.

The next step is painting the cookies.

The drying time is a little longer, than the drying time of royal icing, but it will dry hard and shiny.

Mission accomplished:

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Easter cookie set with purple drop flowers

Do you remember the purple drop flowers I made with TruColor Purple Carrot natural food coloring? Those colors are so pretty and perfect for Easter! Purple is one of the traditional colors of Easter anyway. So I decided to create an Easter set using those flowers.

Here is the whole set. It consists of a candy box, a cross and three cookies of different sizes.
For this set I used the star cutter set and the cross cutter I designed for Cookie Cutter Kingdom. You can still get 10% OFF with the coupon code FRIENDSOFTUNDE if you place an order with them.

If you would like to see how I created these cookies, watch the videos below.

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Valentine's cookies with brush embroidery and natural food colors

It's been a while since my last post, simply because I did not have a single sunny afternoon when I could take pictures. But now, be prepared, today was beautiful and sunny, so I will bring you some new cookies. Here is the first set. Valentine's cookies with brush embroidery pattern and natural food colors from TruColor.

I used a pink shine airbrush base color, the white rose is painted with pearl shine and the word love is fuchsia shine.

Cookie Decorating with TruColor Natural Food Coloring 1. -Purple Carrot and Purple Grape with Royal Icing

I will be honest with you. When I make colorful cookies I don't let my kids eat them, because of the food coloring. I would not mind them eating colored food once in a while, but I have these cookies laying around all year long. And I am sure an overdose of the artificial food coloring would be really harmful.

I was really excited about the natural food color line developed by TruColor. I got them all and I am truly excited about experimenting with these colors on my cookies.

So this post will probably be the first piece of a long series.

Let's experiment with the two basic TruColor product: Purple Carrot and Purple Grape. I have the feeling that these are the purest natural colors we could get. Purple Grape has only 1 ingredient: purple grape skin extract. Purple Carrot has two: purple carrot extract, citric acid. To avoid the use of preservatives, they come in powder form. You have to dilute them in a little distilled water before use.

And the most fun part is, they change color according to the acidity (pH) of your food. This can be a disadvantage if you can not adjust the acidity of your food, but it is actually pretty cool if you can.

In the little containers I put Purple Carrot with distilled water and added lemon juice (left) or baking soda (right) to it to achieve different colors.

Then I started to play with my simplest royal icing recipe (just egg whites and confectioners sugar). It turned out, egg white is a natural base. Adding Purple Carrot resulted in blue icing. All I had to do was to add more and more lemon juice (that I normally add to my royal icing anyway). Then I also added some more confectioners sugar to maintain the piping consistency.

All these flowers were made with the same Purple Carrot coloring. I needed only one jar of coloring for all these nice colors. (And by playing with the quantity of the coloring I could make hundreds of shades. These flowers all have the same saturation, they were all altered from the blue you see at the right side) As they are from the same natural color, they look gorgeous together too.

And here are the cookies made with the little flower. I also used TruColor yellow gel color for the middle of the flowers and leaf green for the leaves.

Then I did the exact same thing with the Purple Grape color:

The result was almost the same. Only the shades are a little different.

Here is my purple grape colored icing flower collection.

And the cookies made with these flowers.

I don't know, if you noticed, but during the few days I was waiting for sunshine to make the pictures, my leaf green colored leaves have faded. They became pretty light, some of them even a little yellowish. I definitely need to experiment more with the TruColor gel colors. But until then, I decided to try one more product on them:

I painted the leaves on these cookies with TruColor Green Shine color.

And I added TruColor Pearl Shine to the flowers and leaves on this cookie.

I hope you find my little experiment helpful!

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