Out with the Old

I don't use a lot of food-coloring. In fact, since Daughter Number Three-Point-One was little, I use it only once a year: to color the icing on Christmas sugar cookies. Perhaps not surprisingly, I've been nursing along the same box of four small bottles since some time in the 1980s:

Check out that vintage packaging!

The last time we made cookies was probably in 2021 (or maybe event 2019, since I'm not sure we did this kind in 2021), and as you can see in the box, we must have used up the red and yellow bottles in the last year of use. 

So, given the apalling ingredients in the Tones coloring...

I decided to get something a bit more natural for the next several decades of cookies:

Here's the ingredient list for the Watkins brand:

In case you're wondering what trehalose is... I just discovered it's a sugar made from insect cocoons. Spirulina is a blue-green algae. I suspect the vegetable juice used for the red color comes from beets, but possibly it's a blend too complicated to list in the space available, and labeling doesn't require it. And turmeric, of course, makes sense as a yellow coloring.

When mixed with white icing, the red comes out mauve to pink, and the green is not a strong green. Adding some yellow to it helps get to a light green-yellow, which is one of my favorite colors. The blue is nice but not quite even cyan, let alone anything more blue. But that was okay.

Purple was never very achievable even with the old colors, and that's still true. Gray-lavender is the best you can get. Orange is more of a mustard color.

Yellow is great! But that makes sense since it's turmeric. 

All of these colors are fine with me because I like nontraditional colors on my holiday cookies. And they didn't have a bitter taste from the dye, either.