Cats On The Homestead: sugar

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Colored Sugar

I am about to embark on the Christmas cookie baking binge. One of the first steps I take each year is to make colored sugar. You can buy this in the store of course, but it is fun to make at home and much less expensive.

All you need is some granulated sugar and food coloring. I use my normal table sugar but you can use larger crystal sugar. It is more impressive I think, but since it is something I do not usually have in my pantry (at least not in white) I just use what I have.

Any liquid or paste food coloring will work. I usually have liquid on hand, but sometimes I have paste. The liquid is easier to use for this project.

Take the amount of sugar you want to color and put it in a jar. I like to do about 1/4 cup of sugar in each color. Add one or two drops of your food coloring. Put a lid on the jar and shake like crazy until well distributed. You may need to take a fork and break up any clumps.

If the color is not dark enough ad another drop, close the jar, and shake again. You can repeat this process until you get the color you want.

Here are my mixing jars. Someday I may take the time to remove the labels completely. I have a large collection of jars I have saved for just such purposes.

Now the last step is really important. You need to dry the sugar. The food coloring made it damp. The more drops of coloring you used the more drying it needs. If you have a lot of time on your hand you can just leave the jar open in a warm spot and occasionally stir or shake the sugar until it is dry. You will need to break up clumps after it is dry (just like brown sugar).

Or you can spread the sugar out in a baking dish and put it in a warm oven to dry. Use the lowest setting on your oven; you are trying to drive off the moisture, not melt the sugar. My oven's lowest setting is 170. It may take 20 minutes to an hour to dry in the oven depending upon the amount of food coloring added and the humidity in the air.

One of the cool things is you can mix food colors to make new colors. This very cool blue came from mixing a purple and several drops of sky blue.

Once dry, store your colored sugar in a sealed container until ready to use. Watch out cookies! Here I come! Don't forget to follow me on Facebook and Pinterest.

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