How to Mix Coloring for Sugar Skulls

Video Transcript

"So, you probably want to make sure that you get the right kind of food coloring for this type of project. The kinds of food colorings you get at the grocery store for, you know, coloring eggs, or maybe basic food coloring, they really aren't strong enough to give the really bright colors that you'll need for example, making the icing that we're going to use to decorate them later. The kind of food coloring that you want is called gel food coloring, or paste food coloring. They're a lot brighter, and you'll probably need to go to a baking store or maybe a candy makers store or cooking store, and they'll have them. So here's an example of one. They kind of come in these bottles and they're a lot more concentrated. So I'm going to just use this stuff too, in order to color the water that I'm going to add to the sugar. And you don't need as much of this as you need, you know, other types of food coloring. You see, it's very, very thick. That's why they call it a gel or a paste. I'm going to make some really, really kind of bright pink sugar skulls this time. So remember, I'm going to color the water. So I'm going to go ahead and kind of dissolve this in water. And you might find that these gel food colors, these paste food colors, they're a little bit harder to kind of dissolve in water than the normal ones are, just because they're thicker and they just kind of require a little bit more stirring, a little bit more manipulation to get them to dissolve. But, okay, but once you have... here's our colored water. Now I'm going to add this colored water to my dry ingredients so that we're going to get a nice, sort of uniformly pink sugar that we can then make some sugar skulls out of. So, because I don't want to get, you know, food coloring all over my hands, I'm going to mix it with the paddle this time. So I'm just going to go ahead and mix this and you can see that it's already kind of a nice, watermelon pink color. And as it kind of mixes in more with the sugar it'll fade out a little bit. But this is a nice, nice rich color. And, you know, this will make some really kind of dramatically pink sugar skulls. So I'm just going to continue mixing this until it's nice and even. Nice and even and homogeneous... feels like that sort of moist beach sand. And then just go back to molding it the way I did the other ones."