Seeing Red

DS's birthday was in mid-January. We celebrated the following weekend. He requested a white cake with red frosting. Now when you're mixing natural colorings it's incredibly hard to achieve a true red. I've never really tried, I've only created pink, especially in frosting.

I have come close to red with painted cookies (beet juice + egg yolk), and I have gotten a red when dying eggs (yellow onion skins), but I've never really tried for frosting.

I did see a gorgeous deep burgundy when I was shopping in Whole Foods before the holiday. I even stopped and talked to the baker. She said that red especially needs a bit of acid to set the color, and when you've saturated the frosting - add more sugar to deepen the color. That was really counter intuitive, I never would have thought that adding more white would help to create red. Of course the coloring she uses (while all-natural) came in a huge 16oz bottle - no fear of running out there!

So I set out to make red frosting. I drained two cans of beets - kept the juice, tossed the beets (ick! Sorry Mom!). I sprinkled a smidgen of turmeric over the beet juice and set it on the stove to reduce. About a half hour later I remembered the eggs I had dyed and I tossed in the skin of one yellow onion. I felt like a mad scientist. When the juice had reduced to about 1/3 of it's original volume I removed it from the heat and strained it through a coffee filter. The coffee filter turned an interesting shade of burgundy. I added 1/4 tsp of lemon extract to the dye (I felt that using lemon as my acid would taste much better than vinegar). I mixed up a batch and a half of frosting and removed 1/3 before adding any liquid. To the 1/3 of white frosting I added some milk until it was spreading consistency. The the rest of the frosting I added the red dye and stirred. It wasn't pink. It wasn't all that red either. It turned out to be rather salmon in color. Perhaps if I had two or three times the amount of dye it would have been more red. Fortunately, it tasted lemony rather than nasty.

DS was okay with it. "It's not pink. I like it. Thanks Mom!" So I frosted his cake and added trimming in white. We had his birthday celebration that evening. He wanted hamburgers and french fries with milkshakes. We added salad. I took lots of pictures.

On Tuesday, youngest DD's school handed out red, white and blue cookies - to celebrate the inauguration and the opening of the newly expanded cafeteria. I made up a sugar cookie recipe, pulled out my extensive collection of cookie cutters and found a flag. I cut out many flags, a few USA shapes, several stars and hearts. The flags I frosted with 13 stripes, properly alternating the red and white frostings, with blue sugar sprinkled over white frosting in the corner. Again, I took pictures.

A couple of days later youngest DD borrowed my camera. She decided she didn't like her pictures, so she managed to delete everything on my memory card. Deleting everything is a three to four step process, alternating between several buttons, it's not an accidental thing. Apparently DD can read just enough now to get in big trouble. I'm still seeing red, and she's not allowed to touch my camera ever again. I took a picture of the only thing left. A sad little bowl of the leftover "red" frosting. After which the DC happily scarfed it down.