Icing to dye for
Kids approve of frosting made with veggies for holiday cookies
DELAWARE — At the Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware, holiday cookie decorating starts with a walk to the greenhouse.
Kids and their parents yanked carrots out of the ground, clipped stalks of kale and leaves of spinach, and a few plucked beets from the dark brown soil. Picking vegetables before a cookie-decorating session? It's all part of the fun.
Those vegetables serve as the coloring agents for the icings that instructor Christine Caruso makes. The class she teaches is about making allnatural food dye instead of using chemicals such as propylene glycol; FD&C red, yellow or blue; and preservatives such as propylparaben.
Some of Caruso's tricks are obvious: Beets and cranberries make red coloring and blueberries make blue. Yet a few are not straightforward, such as the boiled onion skins that produce purple.
“You can boil down carrots for orange; kale for green,” Caruso said. “If you have leftover cranberry sauce, you can use that.”
The spice turmeric makes a vivid yellow. For brown, Caruso just mixes up a bunch of other colors.
The homemade colors are cheap, especially if you have a garden or use scraps from cooking. A 1-ounce box of all-natural food dye from Whole Foods costs $11.50.
As the various tubes of colored icing — both royal and buttercream — were passed around the table Saturday, kids slathered it on sugar cookies and more than once gave it a taste. A bright green icing, made with spinach and kale, was quite popular.
“It doesn’t taste like spinach or kale,” said Lauren Dahlgren, 8, of Powell.
Caruso flavors the icing traditionally, with sugar and lemon or vanilla. Even the turmeric-laced yellow icing received passing marks.
“It’s good,” said Cayden Zachrich, 8, of Galena.
It takes time, though, to make the all-natural colors. Caruso boils the vegetables to extract a bit of color, though spices can be made into a paste with water. Another drawback is that the color red is never quite scarlet.
“The thing with red,” Caruso said, “is that you never get a great red. It’s always a little pink.”
The kids and adults in Caruso’s class took home recipes for food dyes and icings, and each got a bag of cookies that they decorated. The homemade colors are cheap, especially if you have a garden or use scraps from cooking. A 1-ounce box of all-natural food dye from Whole Foods costs $11.50.
“I’m trying to decide which one to eat first,” said Julie Bergstedt of Westerville.