Cake decorating without artificial colours

Hey everyone,

It's my DD 3rd bday on Thursday, so Sunday we are having family over for a cake, and in 2 hours we are having a playdate with her class for next year..

Anyway, today has to be egg free (got a recipe I'm about to do for cupcakes), but we are trying really hard to do a semi fail-safe diet with my DS, and I'm avoiding colours if I can.

Chocolate and sugar seem to be ok (in moderation of course), but yellow in soft drink has made him lose the plot before. Although I haven't done the retest, so maybe I should just use all the colours (although I should use them individually I guess?), but I don't know how to decorate cakes etc without using colours in the icing. Every lolly I can think of (smarties etc) to use instead is also coloured.

Is there anything else you can add to icing to get a good vibrant colour? Is there any other way to decorate cakes??

Please help... I'm a cake hack at the best of times, and this is making it 100 times harder!

Queen have a range of all natural colours, I saw them in Coles last week next to the nasty ones.

I think i saw Christy post something similiar ages ago, but i remember her mentioning the use of beetroot/beetroot juice for colouring?
can't help out otherwise sorry..

we use the queens one that tinks mentioned, the red is beetroot as nic mentioned!

sorry, to make it harder we keep kosher, and I'm not sure queen are on the list...will check.

Has anyone on the failsafe diet tried Queen?

ETA: Ok, Queen is kosher but it is not under the supervision that we normally use, so will check with the Rabbi...

Until then, anyone got any natural colourings ideas?

Do you have a cake decorating supply store near by somewhere? I know wilton do some certified kosher products, i'm just looking at their U.S website now, and they have a food colour spray that is certified kosher, you just spray it on/over your cake (I've never used it though) I thought their food colouring gels were the same as well...I just can't find anything yet... will keep looking. :)

eta: According to their website, their icing colours are certified kosher, and are a gel, so you get a much more vibrant colour using less as well. They have a yellow which i just checked, is daffodil yellow and is suppose to be an all natural colour and does not contain yellow #5. Not sure if that helps you out or not? Maybe if you can find somewhere near you that stocks Wilton products?

CakeDeco are in Melbourne and are a wilton stockist. Maybe give them a call and ask them? (03) 9654 5335
Opening Hours: Mon-Fri 9am-5.30pm, Sat 10am-2pm :)

I also feel funny about using colours so I try to come up with themes that I can use mainly chocolate like teddy bears, construction sites etc.

My last cake though what I did was buy white choc which I melted and added a little of those Queen natural colours mentioned above and put them into choc moulds so I could makes flowers, teddies, letters whatever you can find a mould for. Then I just did basic white icing and put the decorations on top and thought that parents could easily pull off the chocolates before serving them to the kids and then they wouldn't have to eat them if the parents didn't want them to. Or you could do a variation on white, normal or dark choc for your decorations if you didn't want to use any colours.

Wilton products are all kosher but unfortunately, they have heaps of preservatives in them. I use them heaps, but when I was failsafe, I generally did a mix of either chocolate frosting or white.... sometimes I would mix in beetroot puree for a bright pink colour. You could mix in a bit of sweet potato puree for orange as its a sweet flavour, but it would only be a light orange/mustard yellow because you don't want to put too much in. If you are worried about effecting the flavour, add some vanilla bean paste to it. That makes it all yummy and you could use nuttelex for an easier consistency.

oh! I forgot about those, you could get the melts from Wilton and melt them into moulds and put them on as well, and they are kosher.