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.
Pink Royal Icing
- 10-15 fresh or frozen raspberries
- 2 Tbsp meringue powder
- 1/4 cup + 1 Tbsp lukewarm water
- 1 lb confectioners sugar
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.
Try It You Might Like It 
Nutural color is the best 🙂 Your cookies look so fresh and lovely 🙂
I have never thought much about food colouring until now. I will certainly think twice moving forward. Your cookies are absolutely lovely.
🙂 Mandy
Love it!!!
These are stunning cookies and equally stunning photos! I LOVE the idea of natural food dye. Ingenius! One of these beautiful pics should have definitely made Food Gawker or Tastespotting. Hope to see them there! Have a great week!
Oh Geni… thank you! If only you worked for Foodgawker or Tastespotting. I think I just need to start taking photos outside again no matter how much snow we have. 🙂
These are beautiful! We have a food coloring allergy in our home so we always stay away from it. I use beets – I’ll have to try raspberries sometime. 🙂
Thank you Patty! I have a friend at my office who also has a food coloring allergy and I always feel bad when he can’t have a piece of store-bought birthday cake when we’re celebrating a co-worker’s birthday. Once I found out about his allergy I started noticing food coloring in the weirdest foods.
I love you, I love you, I love you! Maybe if I forward this link to my mom, she’ll send me some cookies with your special icing on them…
Lovely photos too, as always!
N
This is great! The natural food coloring is definitely the healthy way to go, and I bet the raspberry taste is a bonus!
Thanks for posting this info! Very helpful, as I will be attempting this for my son’s birthday cake icing soon. And I agree, the photos are great! 🙂
U get natural colour AND the natural flavour. Double points!