Want to decorate your cakes without springing for expensive organic sanding sugar or settling for the cheaper (but still expensive!) conventional sanding sugar? Fortunately, making your own colored sanding sugar takes about ten seconds, and you can use the same high-quality organic sugar and natural food coloring that you already have in your pantry. Here’s how: Start with your favorite organic white sugar, and pour a little into any unused glass jar that has a well-fitting lid. As you can see, we reuse glass jars of all sizes for all kinds of projects! A little sanding sugar goes a long way, so you’ll probably want to use jars that are as small as possible. Regardless, don’t fill the jar more than half-full with sugar, because you’ll need plenty of room to shake it around in a second. Depending on the amount of sugar in your jar, put anywhere from two to several drops of natural liquid food coloring straight in with the sugar. There are a few brands of natural liquid food coloring around, although they can be hard to find; I had to order mine on-line and have it shipped to me, which I hate to do because I’m haunted by the thought of all the energy resources used in getting that one little box across the country to my door, but fortunately a little food coloring lasts a LONG time, so I don’t have to buy it often. I’ve heard that you big-city folks can buy natural food coloring at Whole Foods–is it true? Is it wonderful? I bet it’s wonderful… Next » As soon as you’ve got the food coloring in with the sugar, screw the jar lid on and shake, shake, shake it like a Polaroid picture. It will take several seconds for the food coloring to distribute across all the sugar, and when it has, you can choose to add more color, or a second color. The sugar can be stored right in the glass jar that you used to make it, directly on the pantry shelf for its entire shelf-life. Over time, it will stick together a little in the jar, just like brown sugar does (and for much the same reason), but a bang on the counter or a quick stir will easily un-clump it again. To use, sprinkle the sugar directly on any iced or sticky surface. We use our colored sugar on top of cream cheese for cakes and cookies that are deliciously sweet and brightly colored but that contain no artificial colorants.
