Woman and Machine Process Together

Look at the unit price—its $16-$18 a pound, colored sugar that is. Moreover, when you go through several cups at a whack, well, WOW! It adds up. Therefore, I’ve been thinking for quite sometime if I could make my own. R & D always takes time.

First, I learned about some different food-coloring agents, like liquid food dye and liquid food paste. Sure, it’d be easy to use—squirt it into some medium grain decorating sugar—shake—and you’re done. But to buy it, I’d have to get on line, find it, order it in large bottles; then worst of all, spend too many bucks for those large bottles that would take me years to empty. Couldn’t I just use the Wilton food-coloring paste that’s fairly inexpensive and readily available?

Yes I can, with my Cusinart, anyway. Now that I have figured out how to use the thing (see my first blog), I don’t use it a lot. For the most part, my little hand crank chopper, which also measures what is chopped, or my little electric wing-wingger (so-named for the sound it makes), suits my purposes just fine. However, when there’s some real bad boy processing to be done, I pull out the Cusinart, with all its many parts to assemble, dissemble, wash, sanitize and dry, and begin to process. (I keep it stored on the window sill, covered, so I don’t have to keep puzzling over how to get it back into the box).

Anyway, you, too, can make colored sugar. This is what I did:
1) Poured about a cup of decorating sugar into the food processer base using the plastic blade.
2) Used a toothpick to add a glob of orange food paste color and processed.
3) Because the food paste became just smaller globs, I started adding water in ¼ teaspoon increments til the globs “melted”.
4) But now that the sugar was wet, became packed down and the blade couldn’t process the sugar anymore, I changed to the metal blade and added another cup of decorating sugar.
5) Allow sugar to dry.  Break up any large clumps of dried sugar before storing-- and don't forget to label and date the container!

Voila! Orange colored sugar. I’ll have to see how it works on my sugar cookies, though. The medium grain is now pretty fine. Next time, I want to try it thinning the paste with water before adding it to the sugar and using the plastic blade (so as not to over process the sugar). Happy cookie making!