Making Cookies

Decorating cookies is a fun tradition when December rolls around.

Since we don't use any artificial colors or flavorings, decorating cookies has been a challenge. Our first Christmas following the Feingold Program the children were happily decorating sugar cookies with a variety of chocolate chips, white chocolate chips and nuts, when DH arrived home from work. "The cookies are all black and white! What fun is that!", he exclaimed. So we've experimented with different ways of decorating cookies.


We tried mixing natural colors into the dough, it works okay with Tumeric for a nice yellow, but any other color couldn't stand up to the heat. (I've heard there are other powders that can be bought and mixed, but I haven't tried those).

Then we tried naturally colored sugars. They were a pretty pastel to start with, but the color baked out of those too. And pastel is nice for springtime, but doesn't quite cut it for Christmas.

Coloring frosting and frosting already baked cookies worked. But again, the colors were all pastel and my tradition was to decorate the cookies before baking.

Then we found egg-yolk painting. Mix some natural colors in with the eggyolk, paint on the cookies and bake. The colors turned out rich and dark! We mix tumeric for yellow, beet juice for red, liquid chlorophyll for green, cocoa for brown and plain egg white for a clear glaze. Pictured above are cookies before baking. The best part is that the colors get even darker in the baking process, so the pinkish color actually turns out red.

We still use various chocolate chips with some other cookies, but the eggyolk painting fills our need for rich, vibrant color.