In this complete food coloring guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about food coloring, including the differences between liquid, gel, and powder varieties. Decorating with food coloring is easy once you learn a few simple tips and tricks!
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Why Use Food Coloring
After spending hours shaping sugar cookies or baking an impressive layer cake, it’s finally time for the fun part: decorating!
Every so often, I’m perfectly content with basic white powdered sugar icing or plain cream cheese frosting. However, for the most part, I like to make my finished desserts POP with vibrant splashes of color!
And the best way to achieve bright, eye-catching designs is to use liquid, gel, or powdered food coloring. In this food coloring guide, I’ll teach you everything you need to know about food coloring, including the best types to use, tips for success, and my favorite recipes to decorate using food coloring.
Food Coloring Guide: 3 Main Types
This comprehensive food coloring guide details the pros and cons of liquid, gel, and powdered food coloring.
1. Liquid Food Coloring
Arguably the most common type of food coloring, liquid food coloring is easily found in the baking aisle at every major grocery store. It’s a water-based dye that produces lighter shades of all your favorite colors.
- Pros: They’re very easy to use. Simply add drops to your frosting or batter until you reach your desired hue.
- Cons: Unfortunately, water-based food dye produces watered-down, washed-out-looking colors. And, the more liquid food coloring you add to your recipe, the higher the chance you’ll water down whatever you’re making. This can lead to cookies that spread, cakes that don’t rise, and soupy frosting.
- How to use: Liquid food dye is best reserved for coloring Easter eggs or for the times you want just a hint of color.
2. Gel Food Coloring
Gel food coloring is my secret weapon for bright and vibrant colors! Unless you’re an experienced baker, you probably haven’t heard of gel food coloring. I order mine online, and my preferred brands are Americolor and Wilton.
- Pros: Unlike liquid food coloring, gel food coloring has a glycerin or corn syrup base, resulting in concentrated, intensely colored shades of dye. Since it’s highly concentrated, a little bit goes a long way, making it perfect for recipes where the ratio of wet to dry ingredients absolutely cannot be thrown off, like these red velvet macarons.
- Cons: Since gel food coloring is so concentrated, it’s easy to oversaturate your colors.
- How to use: Start with a single drop of gel food coloring. Then, add more as needed. The color will continue to darken over time. So, it’s best to make colored icings and frostings in advance.
3. Powder Food Coloring
Perhaps the most versatile option, powdered food coloring can be mixed into frostings or batter, brushed onto cookies, or combined with flavored extract and used as a paint. Since it’s a powder, it won’t dry out like liquids and gels can.
- Pros: Powdered food coloring is great for recipes where added liquid could seriously mess up the recipe. Like gel food coloring, it’s highly concentrated and produces deep, intensely-colored pigments.
- Cons: You’ll most likely have to purchase it online, and it requires some advanced decorating skills to perfect. It might take some trial and error to get it right!
- How to use: Use powdered food dye in recipes where added moisture might cause an issue, like chocolates, meringues, and macarons.
Water-Soluble vs. Oil-Soluble Food Coloring
Most food coloring is either water-based or oil-based, also known as water-soluble or fat-soluble. It’s important to learn the difference between the two types before you add food coloring to your recipe.
- Water-based food coloring – Mix water-based food coloring with water-based recipes, such as royal icing, meringues, and macarons.
- Oil-based food coloring – These mix well with high-fat recipes, such as chocolate, candy melts, and buttercream frosting. I adore Color Mill oil blend food colorings for coloring white chocolate.
Do you know the saying that oil and water don’t mix? Well, that applies here, too! If the main ingredient in the recipe is butter or oil, stick with oil-based food coloring. And if the recipe is light and low-fat, then water-based food coloring is a better choice.
Check the ingredients
Take a look at your food coloring ingredients to quickly identify whether the food coloring is water-based or oil-based. If it starts with water, it’s most likely water-based food coloring. If it contains any kind of oil, it’s oil-based food coloring.
Natural Food Coloring vs. Synthetic Food Coloring
If you’re looking for bright colors that stand out, synthetic food coloring is the way to go. Unfortunately, natural food coloring, like beet juice and ground turmeric, just doesn’t cut it.
- Synthetic food coloring is made using artificial dyes, often labeled as FD&C red 40, yellow 5, and blue 1. The colors are vivid and consistent and usually don’t impart undesirable flavors or textures into your food. Overall, synthetic food dyes are pretty predictable, and their learning curve is relatively small.
- Natural food coloring is derived from plant-based sources, such as spirulina, spinach powder, paprika, and turmeric, just to name a few! Even though they add color to baked goods and frostings, they can also change the flavor of whatever you’re making. The colors are often quite dull and can change when exposed to heat.
Food Coloring Tips
A food coloring guide wouldn’t be complete without a few tips for success.
- Start small. Add just 1-2 drops at a time. Then, give your frosting or batter a good stir before adding more color. You can always add more dye, but you can’t take it away!
- Be patient. Food coloring deepens over time. After you mix it in, wait at least 15 minutes to see if the color darkens.
- Use clear, glass bowls. You won’t be able to see the true color of whatever you’re mixing if you’re using a colored bowl.
- Starting with a white base is best. Chocolate, buttercream, and fruity-flavored frostings and batters will be harder to color because they already have a natural tint.
- Create custom colors with caution. You need to know what you’re doing before you start mixing shades. Research color formulations online, and experiment with a small amount of batter or frosting so you don’t accidentally ruin your entire batch.
- Have fun! Don’t worry too much about making a mistake. Decorating is supposed to be a fun (and delicious) way to show off your creative side!
Ideas for Using Food Coloring
With this food coloring guide, you can easily master any of the decorating techniques outlined in the recipes below!
- Valentine’s Day Sugar Cookies – Learn how to make deep red royal icing using gel food coloring. I teach you how to use brown food coloring to achieve the brightest and boldest red icing!
- Red Velvet Layer Cake or Red Velvet Cupcakes – You can use either liquid or gel food coloring for these recipes!
- DIY Colored Sugar – I use gel food coloring because it doesn’t add too much moisture to the sugar and adds a nice, bright color! It’s a fun and inexpensive way to add colorful sparkles to your sugar cookies.
- Strawberry Swiss Buttercream and Strawberry Macarons – A small amount of pink gel food coloring gives the buttercream and macarons a beautiful pink hue!
Food Coloring Guide FAQs
Synthetic food coloring has a pretty long shelf life, and it’s highly unlikely that it will spoil or go bad. There’s a chance liquid or gel food coloring could dry out if it’s not stored properly, though. Also, if you’ve had it for several years, it might lose some of its potency. For the longest shelf-life, store food coloring in a cool, dark cabinet and make sure the lids are tightly closed.
Mixing colors can be tricky! You don’t want to waste a batch of homemade buttercream by accidentally turning it into an unappetizing shade of brown because too many colors are mixed together. It’s best to start small and reference a food coloring mixing chart online, like this food coloring mixing chart from McCormick.
Synthetic food coloring should not change how your food tastes unless you’re using an unnecessarily large quantity. If you’re using a reasonable amount the only way you know it’s in your food is because you can see it! However, natural food coloring can taste like the plant it’s derived from. So, use these at your own risk!
