Birthday cake

As part of the green project we have been trying to cut down on food with incomprehensible lists of ingredients. There is something rather bizarre about eating stuff that you don't actually know what is and I am not talking about exotic fruits or rare sorts of flour, but all the chemicals, additives etc that exist in a lot of food.

I am definitely no Michelin starred chef and as a working mum I often need something quick and easy to feed the family, so I know exactly why a lot of us end up eating fish fingers, beans and other culinary 'delights'. But I have managed to change my track record to some extend and it has brought some surprises with it.

E.g. for years my daughter refused to eat sausages, she said they were horrible; but since we started buying most meat from the local butcher this has completely changed and she will now happily finish a plate - and ask for seconds. Same story goes for burgers - at a visit to an organic farm she suddenly realised that burgers can be very delicious and Daddy ended up with only one bite to himself.

The problem is that we are so used to the chemical substitutes that the alternative can be hard to find, or be rather expensive. I was therefore delighted when my husband brought home an article on homemade food colouring - just in time for my son's 3rd birthday. Children's birthdays usually end up as a rather horrendous cocktail of additives, chemicals and far from natural colours, so this was my chance to show that things can be different.

When making your own food colouring you basically use the juice from cooked fruit or veg and I was all set to go when I came across the first problem. A lot of fruit produces pink juice! That will be great for my daughter's next birthday, but somehow a pink train wasn't really the plan for this birthday party. The article did suggest to make green icing using spinach, but frankly the idea of chocolate cake with spinach icing didn't sound very good to me and probably even worse to my son who hates spinach. So I decided to opt for the darkest fruit I could find and ended up with a small tray of bramble - obviously imported from somewhere, so not exactly local, but sometimes compromises have to be made. And I did manage to create a liquid of a reasonably dark colour - definitely not princess pink. So far so good.

Then it started going down hill. I had opted for plain sugar icing, because it is simple to make and that way I could avoid buying ready made stuff with additives in it. I had however forgotten to check the cocoa level in the cupboard and the tub was empty! My chocolate icing plan was out of the window. This meant I was down to 2 colours: dark pink and white.

I was still optimistic it could be done - one mishap wasn't going to spoil my ambition of a totally natural birthday cake!

So I started spreading the white icing... Which very quickly turned into white icing filled with little brown specks of chocolate cake crumbs. Not good. It all looked rather dirty and not very attractive. I had used up all the red(ish) icing, so couldn't just cover it up and I was very quickly running out of time before the birthday guests arrived. This was the part when my ambition collapsed!

I needed something to attract attention away from the 'dirty' white icing and started rumaging through cupboards. What did I find: a box of mini smarties and some sprinkles. Perfect! Bright and colourful, nobody would notice the brown specks.

And the point of this story is? Maybe that no birthday can be complete without a few chemical additives? Hopefully not! The point is actually that it is not that difficult to make your own food colouring, if I can most people can. The only thing to remember is not to be as unorganised as me, check you cupboard for ingredients before shopping rather than 15min before the guests arrive!




Here is a picture of my efforts - even if I didn't quite succeed!









PS If anybody fancies giving homemade food colouring a go this is the article I worked from:
http://www.metro.co.uk/lifestyle/824504-it-s-the-icing-on-the-cake-naturally