Recipe for mauve food coloring

With all their dark, rich natural color, blackberries lend a lovely lavender color to foods. As with other berries, you can simply squeeze fresh blackberry juice to make a dye. For a bit of frosting, simply put some blackberries in a piece of cheesecloth or muslin, twist, and squeeze out the juice into the food to dye. Add more to reach the color you want.

Recipe for mauve food coloring

Note: The food colouring is diluted with water in this picture.

In this tutorial, you can learn how to make natural blue and purple food colouring that can be used to dye savoury dishes. It’s quite simple – all the ingredients you need are red cabbage, vinegar and baking soda. Red cabbage is a vegetable with an interesting property: it serves as an ph indicator. Wikipedia quote: “Red Cabbage juice is pink in acidic solutions, purple in solutions of ~pH7, and turns blue in basic solutions, and green in very basic solutions.” Amazing, isn’t it? We can obviously use that to our advantage.

Oh and you can learn how to make use of the homemade colouring. There are instructions for making a blue radish rose at the bottom.

Homemade Blue & Purple Food Colouring

• red cabbage
• acidic ingredient, for example regular vinegar
• alkaline ingredient, for example baking soda

1. Wash the cabbage and cut out the stem.
2. Chop into small pieces.
3. Put it into a cooking pot and add water until the cabbage is covered.
4. Simmer for 10 minutes, then drain.
5. You now have a purple solution that still has cabbage aroma to it. Add vinegar for a more pinkish purple and baking soda for blue. Start with small amounts and gradually increase until you reach the desired colour. Keep in mind that vinegar and baking soda affect the taste of the food colouring, so don’t overdose it. Plus I guess eating too much baking soda may bear a health risk.
6. You can substitute vinegar with other acidic solutions, for example white wine or lemon juice. Baking soda can be substituted with spinach juice, green tea and other alkaline food.
7. You can dye a variety of food with this colouring. White food items are most prone to absorb the colour. Examples: cauliflower, couscous, pasta, egg whites, mashed potatoes, steamed bread, white radish etc.
8. Be aware of pH values when mixing your food colouring with other ingredients. It’s impossible to dye a vinegar based salad dressing blue for example. Making blue yogurt probably requires an extra pinch of baking soda, and so on.
9. The colour of red cabbage juice in itself isn’t susceptible to heating but telling from my experience that isn’t the case when you add baking soda. Heating the food colouring AFTER you’ve added baking soda turns the mixture greenish. So I suggest you either add the baking soda after the cooking process of the dish has finished, or, if that’s not possible, like in the case of steamed bread, you simply reduce the amount added and experiment a bit.

How to make a Blue Radish Rose

• white radish
• salt
• blue food colouring
• sugar

1. Peel and slice the radish with a mandoline. I made 1mm slices.
2. Sprinkle a bit of salt on the bottom of a container, then place the slices inside and sprinkle with salt again. Let it stand for 15 minutes.
3. Wash the salt away and add food colouring mixed with a tsp of sugar to the container so the slices are covered well. Let the radish absorb the colour for a few hours.
4. When the desired nuance is obtained, layer 6 slices like shown in the picture.
5. Roll them. Cut the roll in the middle and pull the “petals” of the roses apart. If that’s hard to do, cut a bit of the bottom part away.

Posted in Decoration | Tags: blue, cabbage, dye, food colouring, purple

Recipe for mauve food coloring

DIY Natural Food Dye

Simple, 1-ingredient natural food dye perfect for coloring frostings, baked goods, and more!
Author Minimalist Baker

4.88 from 8 votes
Prep Time 5 minutes minutes
Total Time 5 minutes minutes
Servings 3 (1-Tbsp servings)
Course Sauce
Cuisine Gluten-Free, Vegan
Freezer Friendly No
Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Ingredients

• 1 large beet

Instructions

Wash and thoroughly scrub your beet. Then finely grate over a paper towel or thin, clean dish towel, being sure to set the towel over a plate so the beet juice doesn’t stain your countertops. 1 beet should yield roughly 3 Tbsp (45 ml) beet juice.

Once your beet is grated, gently squeeze the beet juice into whatever you’re dying – in this case, it was buttercream frosting for vegan sugar cookies.

The more juice you add, the more intense the hue (see photos).

Other readers have suggested turmeric for yellow, pomegranate for red, and matcha powder or spirulina for green!

Notes

*Nutrition information is a rough estimate.

Nutrition (1 of 3 servings)

Serving: 1 one-Tbsp servings Calories: 7 Carbohydrates: 1.5 g Protein: 0.2 g Fat: 0 g Saturated Fat: 0 g Trans Fat: 0 g Cholesterol: 0 mg Sodium: 0 mg Fiber: 0 g Sugar: 1.4 g

Reader Interactions

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1. Vikki R Shelton says July 20, 2023 at 11:42 am

I need suggestions for black icing with no dyes! please help thanks!

• Support @ Minimalist Baker says July 20, 2023 at 1:31 pm

Hi, you might be able to use black cocoa powder! Or possibly activated charcoal if you’re comfortable adding it to food.

This was very helpful in making an artificial dye-free icing for some strawberry cupcakes. I DEFINITELY recommend a cheese cloth or dish towel and not paper towels because the paper towels absorb too much of the juice as well as start tearing as you squeeze. Yes your towel will be permanently stained but if you make your own dyes frequently just set that one aside to be the one you use each time. Also if you don’t want your hands to be stained for a while, wear food prep gloves.

• Support @ Minimalist Baker says June 24, 2022 at 11:03 am

Thank you for sharing, Ellen! We’re so glad it was helpful!

Pandan leaves in the grinder, or mortar n pestle, without water, grind till fine, and squeeze. The extract both tastes and smells good, besides giving a green colour

Hi there,
Can this be use for cookie dough?

• Support @ Minimalist Baker says February 4, 2021 at 10:05 am

Perhaps! The color may become less vibrant with baking though.
Of you wanted to bake any tips on how to keep the color vibrant? Thank you!!

• Support @ Minimalist Baker says October 18, 2021 at 3:42 pm

Hm, we’re not sure, sorry!

• Chelsea says October 18, 2021 at 7:22 pm

I appreciate your reply! Thank you.

I recently used purple cabbage with some baking soda to dye my frosting using this method after quickly boiling it! It worked great and came out a really beautiful blue. I assume you can not add the backing soda for a purple, as the only reason it was blue was due to the ph change from the baking soda!

• Yashasswini says July 26, 2020 at 10:00 pm

Hello.. thank you.. it was so helpful for me. I was tried red velvet cake with beetroot puree instead of food colour. Taste is good but it was turned out like a pudding . Can I able try these food colour by adding it in cake batter? Pls tell me. If it can, tell me that how to add beet juice means directly can I add few drops of beet juice r else I have to mix beet juice with icing sugar? I wanna try a red velvet cake for my brother’s birthday

• Dana @ Minimalist Baker says July 27, 2020 at 2:59 pm

Hi there! I’d recommend adding it in purée form, such as in this recipe!

I would love recipe suggestions for red velvet cupcakes –no artificial dyes please!
thank you,
Carol in Phoenix

This was so easy! Other recipes require you to cook the beets but this is way faster. I made the Minimalist Baker funfetti cupcake recipe (except without the sprinkles) and of course it was amazing!! None of my friends could believe they were vegan.
I wanted to try dying the icing the color of red wine. I was worried it would taste weird with that much beet juice. I got the icing a pretty deep pink and I still couldn’t taste the beet flavor. I added cocoa to make it more like the color of wine. The amount of beet juice made it runnier, so I just added extra powdered sugar until it thickened up. It tasted really good with a little bit of cocoa! I didn’t get the color quite right but I was still impressed what you can do with beet juice and a little cocoa. Next time, I would just make the icing without the splash of non-dairy milk and would use the beet juice to thin it instead.

• Support @ Minimalist Baker says August 20, 2018 at 8:07 am

We are glad to hear you enjoyed this recipe, Kim!

Wow ! Thanks so much for the lovely idea. I used it for my daughter’s birthday cake. Pink frosting and all of us loved it. It was my first try and it came out very well.

• Lele says October 29, 2019 at 1:25 pm

This was the most helpful way to make this it was so easy, it was my cousins birthday and I didn’t want to make her a plain white cake.i loved how this recipe didn’t need anything to do with cooking like the other recipes

• Support @ Minimalist Baker says October 30, 2019 at 10:14 am

Thanks so much for the lovely review, Lele. We are so glad you enjoyed it! Next time, would you mind leaving a rating with your review? It’s super helpful for us and other readers. Thanks so much! Xo

Hi,was thinking of using beet for pink color..can i make my beetbuttercream frosting 2 days in advance.Am worried will it make buttercream color discolored

Thanks! I’m going to try this for my daughter’s birthday party.
Do you think this would work to colour white chocolate, or would it make it runny?

• Support @ Minimalist Baker says October 3, 2017 at 8:40 pm

Hi Melissa! That should work!

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• Support @ Minimalist Baker says April 5, 2017 at 7:29 pm

Hi! We quite often add videos and how-to’s to our recipes so be on the look out for upcoming ones!

• Becky says September 23, 2019 at 9:19 pm

I actually love the straightforward simplicity of your blog. I wouldn’t change a thing. I hate sites where I have to scroll forever to find the recipe.

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Im doing a rainbow cupcake and I want to use natural ways to color the batter.
beets-red
matcha podwer -green
blueberries – purple
what can I you use for yellow, orange and blue? Im afraid that all these different ingredients will give the cupcakes a weird taste. any suggestion?

• Support @ Minimalist Baker says February 16, 2017 at 6:33 pm

Hi Nivian!
For yellow: turmeric powder should do the trick!
Orange: carrot juice!
Blue: This may help. I have not tried these but if you do, report back on how it goes! Good luck!

I accidentally made my daughter’s raspberry cupcakes blue-green. Not sure what happened, but I think it was a reaction like the one mentioned with purple cabbage. I added pulverized freeze-dried raspberries into a recipe for vegan, yellow cake batter (whatever I had left over from when I made the frosting). To my surprise, when we were ready to frost them, they were blue-green. Still tasted great though.

• Kathy says December 22, 2019 at 11:57 am

I have been told that when you add natural colorings, especially in the red and purple shades, that if you are baking that food it turns brown. So that would mean cookie dough and cake batter, right? I just wonder how the other colors react to heat.

what do you recommend I use to make black coloring?

• Support @ Minimalist Baker says February 16, 2017 at 6:32 am

Hi! Though I have not tried this, you can apparently use black cocoa powder or activated charcoal powder to make a natural black dye. Report back if you give it a try! Good luck!

great.
And helpful

This sounds like a silly question and I see it mentioned above. Does the beet or even spirulina affect the taste? I am joining in on my first cookie decorating day with my mother-in-laws family and wanted to use your cookie recipe along with icing.

• Support @ Minimalist Baker says December 29, 2016 at 6:43 pm

A little, depends on how much you use. With the amount of beet juice you see there, not really. But spirulina has a stronger taste.

Amazing recipe and no beet taste at all! Thanks and happy holidays!

This sounds like a silly question and I see it mentioned above. Does the beet or even spirulina affect the taste? I am joining in on my first cookie decorating day with my mother-in-laws family and wanted to use your cookie recipe along with icing.

• Dana @ Minimalist Baker says December 6, 2016 at 4:23 pm

A little, depends on how much you use. With the amount of beet juice you see there, not really. But spirulina has a stronger taste.

Love this!
Any suggestions for St. Patty’s Day?

• Dana @ Minimalist Baker says February 18, 2016 at 4:45 pm

Cherries = Pink to Red

Cherries, like other berries, make for excellent natural food stains. As with blueberries, for just a bit of dye and a lighter pink color, simply put a few cherries in a piece of cheesecloth or muslin, and twist and squeeze some dying juice. For a more intense color, pit the cherries, whirl them in a blender or food processor, strain the purée, and boil down to about half its volume. Let cool before using. For a delicate pink, strawberries work too!

Continue to 6 of 8 below.

06 of 08

Red Cabbage = Blue

Red cabbage requires a tiny bit of extra effort to turn it into food dye, but the pure blue color is totally worth it. Chop about 1/4 head of red cabbage; put the cabbage in a saucepan with about 1 cup water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to maintain a simmer, and cook 20 minutes. Strain or lift out and discard the cabbage pieces. Stir 1 teaspoon baking soda into the purple liquid to turn it blue. Boil to reduce to about half its original volume, or even more for a deeper and more intense blue. Let it cool and use as blue food dye.

Continue to 7 of 8 below.

07 of 08

Spinach or Kale = Green

Just as spinach and other dark leafy greens such as kale will stain your cutting board, they will stain other food. Whirl them in a blender or food processor, strain the purée through a fine-mesh sieve, and use the juice to dye food green.

Continue to 8 of 8 below.