This block focused on cake decor, and it was a little tough for me navigate through. There was a locus of this uneasiness: food coloring. Cakes are known for their vibrant colors, but for me, food should taste how it looks — I just couldn’t bring myself to blithely squeeze color into my icing. If something is red, I think of such delicious flavors as raspberries… beets… cherries… But food coloring in icing undermines this; it’s color for the sake of color. Since I am more interested in the taste of food, I would rather that artificial colors be used artistically in paintings and pieces of inedible art. Also, I consciously avoid foods with food coloring in my normal life, so to use it in my culinary life seems disingenuous. I don’t have any hard proof that it’s bad for humans, and I don’t have anything against decorators who want to use it or people who want to eat it, and I know that very little is needed to color something… but it’s just a personal lifestyle choice for me to make and eat naturally colored foods. That just feels right for me.

So, I tossed these thoughts around in my head as I made my cakes as color-free as possible, until I finally asked the Chef Instructor about alternatives to food coloring, thinking that I could experiment with fruit purees. It turned out that the school has samples of natural food coloring!

Their website says that they’re made from fruits, vegetables, and other edible plants. Because of that, the colors actually have the flavors of what they’re made with (and the bottles of coloring must be refrigerated, hence the nifty cooler above). We only had six colors, but I liked the way they looked: less plastic, a little more real. This is how I colored my buttercream with the Tangerine color:

So, in my ideal world, I’d still have all my frosting burst with fresh flavors, but this seems like a more viable alternative that keeps the fun of colors in cakes. And all I had to do was ask about it…

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Culinary School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.