Homemade Natural Food Coloring

Kids love colorful food. I love the look of colorful cookies but I have issues with using chemical food coloring. I’ve been searching for natural food coloring in every grocery store that I’ve visited as of late to no avail. Instead of ordering something online I did a quick search and found out that you can use several different foods as homemade natural food coloring. We needed to make some sugar cookies for my son’s preschool and I wanted to have pink cookies so we used raspberries to color our royal icing.

Press the raspberries through a sieve reserving all the juice.  You’ll get about one tablespoon of raspberry juice. Add more raspberries for a brighter color but the icing will also have a stronger raspberry flavor.

Combine all remaining ingredients in a large bowl and beat with a hand-held mixer on high for about 5 minutes. Reserve about 1/3 of the white frosting for contrasting effect on the cookies. Add the raspberry juice to the remaining icing and mix well. The colored icing should be the right consistency for flooding your cookies. I used the white icing for outlining the cookies and filled in with pink.

The kids had a blast helping decorate the cookies and of course sprinkles were involved. The sprinkles had chemical food coloring so the point of using the raspberries was a little redundant. You’ve got to do what you can to make things healthier so I was happy.

My daughter was reluctant to try the pink icing because she doesn’t like raspberries but eventually she did and now I’ve got to hide the cookies so there will some left for my son to take to school.

The kids were really getting the hang of using the frosting bags and there was little to no frosting incidents. They love making cookies with a specific person in mind and left cookies for me and their dad at each of our places at the dining room table.

I love seeing their creativity like this.