Product Review: India Tree Natural Decorating Colors

$22.99 plus s&h 

set of three: red, yellow, blue

Rating: C--

India Tree is a Seattle-based company that sells "sugar, spices, and other fine food products from around the world" according to their website. I have used their powdered sugar

 to make cookie icing and it's really quite good.  I recently was on the prowl for natural substitutes for the food colors you can buy in the grocery store, which are of course artificial.  I did a thorough web search and found that the India Tree brand was the only one that seemed to have any positive reviews.  Even this brand had some negatives, ones that turned out to be true.

I wish I could rave about these, but I can't.   The package of three costs anywhere from $17-25 online; I wasn't able to find them locally anywhere--my Whole Foods carries India Tree products, including decorating sugars, but not these colors.  Two of the three places I found them online ended up not having them in stock. 

Once I finally got them in the mail I was ready to make Royal Icing for my Thanksgiving cookies (recipe to follow).  I followed the instructions and put a few drops of the yellow and the red in the icing to make orange.  I was never able to get more than the palest of peaches, and there is a decided flavor to the colorings, which is not pleasant to me.  The Kidz said it tasted like orange tic-tacs.  Unfortunately, I am not fond of orange tic-tacs.  Plus, I didn't see the resemblance.

I did some more internet research and found some other ideas, such as using cocoa, coffee, and berry juice to color icing.  I even tried cherry natural gelatin and got a nice pink out of it and a nice taste, too!

So for now, I have to recommend against using these as real alternatives to the saturated, dense colors you can get from artificial food colors.  If you're okay with more muted, pastel colors, trying berries and other natural foods is a cheaper--and tastier--way to go.  I will probably buy some of the decorating sugars to accent white icing in the future and see how they taste; they come in lots of beautiful, rich colors.