July 19, 2021

Naturally Colored Rainbow Pound Cake

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you know that I never shy away from a chance to add color to my desserts. I typically do that with gel food color, as it’s an excellent way to pack a colorful punch without introducing lots of moisture or solids to a recipe. However, I also adore the ways that fruits and vegetables can add natural color to foods! This rainbow pound cake is colored with four different fruits/vegetables/botanicals, which give the final cake a really beautiful muted swirl. Small amounts of each colorant are added here so they don’t add much flavor to the cake. If you want a specific flavor, I recommend adding a clear extract (like almond, vanilla, or rosewater) to the cake batter.

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Working Natural Colors into a Recipe

Adding gel food colors to a recipe is simple, as they’re formulated to have very low water content and to be highly concentrated. This means that you only need a little bit to get the color you need, and that little bit is rarely enough to mess with the structure of your recipe.

Working with natural colors is a different story! There are a lot of ways to add color to a dessert using fruits, vegetables, spices, and herbs, and they all have different implications for the final structure and flavor of a recipe. I want briefly to run through some coloring options and their possible effects on baked goods so you can get comfortable adding color to your bakes in the future!

Quick Reference: Adding natural colors

Category	How to Incorporate	Examples
Powdered	Powders tend to clump when added to a wetter materials. To prevent clumps and ensure even blending, mix the powdered element with a small portion of your batter (about 1/4 cup batter for every tablespoon of powder) and mix well to form a paste. Stir that paste into the rest of your batter.	Turmeric, Matcha, red beet powder, spirulina
Infused	For elements that need to be steeped in liquid to release their color, I recommend making a very concentrated infusion. To do this, steep the coloring ingredient in hot water (milk/cream also works, if that fits your recipe better). Use 2 tablespoons of hot water for every 1 tablespoon of coloring ingredient. Let steep for 5-10 minutes to extract the color, and then strain the colored “tea” into your batter and blend.	Dried butterfly pea flower, dried hibiscus
Liquid	I urge caution with these! Adding large amounts of liquid can change the makeup of your recipe a great deal, and isn’t the most effective way to add color. Not only does it change the hydration of a recipe, but many fruit juices are acidic, which will throw the recipe’s leavening system (the baking soda/baking powder) out of whack. Many fruits also change color when they’re heated or mixed with components with different acidities, so the color of your batter isn’t necessarily representative of what your final dessert will look like. For example, rhubarb puree starts out pink but turns grey-green when added to acidic cheesecake batter and heated. If you need to use a fruit juice, I recommend heating it until it reduces down to a thick, concentrated syrup and adding that to your recipe instead.	Fruit puree, fruit juice, tea

The Pound cake

I need to take a moment to talk about the pound cake itself, because it’s so so gooood. The naturally colored marble pound cake is based off of the powdered sugar pound cake by Amanda of Midwest Nice – it’s a recipe that’s been in her family for years, and it’s clear why.

Using powdered sugar instead of granulated sugar reduces the amount of air that can be whipped into the cake batter, creating an amazingly-plush crumb. Granulated sugar is typically creamed with butter in cake recipes because the granules behave like tiny paddles that pull air into the creaming mixture and create lightness in the whipping butter by forming a zillion little air pockets. When the cake bakes, the starch in the flour swells into stable networks (gelatinizes is the fancy technical term!) as the sugar dissolves, retaining the air pockets that the sugar and butter worked so hard to create.

When powdered sugar is used in place of granulated sugar, like in this pound cake, the air pockets typically formed during the creaming stage don’t form. Instead of whipping air into the butter, the powdered sugar just dissolves. This means that the air pockets in the batter are much smaller, yielding a very smooth, close crumb. This crumb has a velvety texture when you eat it, and it melts in your mouth beautifully.

Whether adding color or not, this cake is definitely going to be my go-to pound cake recipe going forward!

The inspiration

This butterfly pea flower marbled pound cake by Ethany of @tenderherbs
The muted rainbows of Liz of @buuckfarmsbakery

The Overview

The Quick Look

	Components	Source/Adapted From
1	Rainbow Powdered Sugar Pound Cake	Midwest Nice
1a	Blue Cake Batter	Lanibakes
1b	Yellow Cake Batter	Lanibakes
1c	Green Cake Batter	Lanibakes
1d	Orange Cake Batter	Lanibakes
2	Vanilla Glaze	Lanibakes