The colour of food article

Just like children, adults and the elderly alike appreciate food that is aesthetically pleasing, a little bit whacky, or even pure bonkers. Colour gives food its identity, it’s what draws us to it when we’re doing the weekly shop at Tesco or Aldi. The colour of food either makes it a huge success, or the most popular item in the reduced price section, left unwanted and unloved. Sweet foods are affected the most by their use of colour, green sweets and blue icing on top of fairy cakes, colour suits sweet food’s more due to it’s luscious, sweet taste, it needs such a rich colour to match its taste, and compliment it all the same.

Food colouring is a simple and cheap method of giving food colour, all you have to do is add a drop to your mixture, whether that be cake mix or rice in a saucepan, and voila, the food takes on a whole new colour. This can be great when making cakes for a charity cake sale, or for the next house party, as it will make your cakes stand out from everybody else’s, and who doesn’t love to see a multi-coloured cake? You can buy food colouring from your local supermarket, for as cheap as £1 a bottle, so there should be no excuse for boring cakes.

There are other ways of adding colour to food however, you can put other food products into the mixture, such as glacier cherries into muffins, white chocolate chips into cookies, pink marshmallows into brownies, or even, touching on the nutritious side, blueberries into muffins. This not only adds a delicious taste to the food, but also adds a splash of colour, brightening up the otherwise ordinary looking food product, making it look massively more aesthetically appealing, and even make it taste better, something different and yummy added to the mixture.

Of course you don’t have to add things to the mixture of cake for example, to add colour. Once the cakes are cooked and have been left to cool, you can decorate them with icing or sweets or even fruit, there’s nothing wrong with slices of banana on top of a fairy cake, or a Victoria sponge cake, to add a little treat to it. Hundreds and thousands are also a great, easy way to add colour to food. Sprinkling them on top of an iced brownie or fairy cake, for example, can create a sparkling or rainbow effect, and will entice people to want to try one, to see if they taste as good as they look.

Adding colour to food products, especially sweet foods such as cakes or cookies, is a really easy way of getting colour back into food, to make it eye catching, and also to encourage people to try it, to see if it lives up to its appearance in taste. Adding colour doesn’t have to be tricky or expensive, so even students can afford to make their food a colourful masterpiece.