Red VelvetGate

I’ve always used Silver Spoon’s food colouring when baking red velvet cakes. The Hummingbird recipe calls for 40ml of the stuff, and the Silver Spoon variety comes in handy 38ml bottles. It also gives the sponge a lovely deep, vibrant red colour. Hummingbird even recommend Silver Spoon in their online FAQ’s (following the discontinuation of the previously recommended Dr Oetker variety). However, when I went to my local Sainsbury’s recently, I was horrified to see that the spot on the shelf between the chocolate sprinkles and the icing sugar had been taken over by a Sainsbury’s own brand red food colouring imposter.

Not too disheartened, I scoured a few of my favourite online baking supply stores, but I couldn’t find any Silver Spoon. Getting slightly nervous, I tried amazon (out of stock), eBay (0 results found) and then some random haphazard Google searching (no joy). There’s heaps of other brands out there, but my Googling wasn’t providing much in the way of definitive advice. I have also experienced a few disasters in my time, for example I learned the hard way that the now ‘natural’ Dr Oetker stuff turns the sponge a muddy brown and gives it a distinct stench of putrid beetroot. I was getting a bit desperate. Eventually, fed up with my whining, my boyfriend decided to email Silver Spoon and get to the bottom of things.

This was their response:

“Following a recent product range review, I can confirm that the decision has been taken to discontinue production of our Silver Spoon Create Red Food Colouring”

I’ve been in mourning since.

Today I finally accepted that I need to move on from Silver Spoon. So instead I used a splodge (technical term) of Sugarflair concentrated paste in Christmas red, mixed with just shy of 40ml of water and 20g of cocoa powder. Thankfully, it turned out to be a pretty good substitute. I’m planning to turn the sponge into some tasty raspberry and white chocolate cake pops tomorrow!

I also discovered something that you might find helpful when baking macarons. If you’re having trouble peeling your macarons off the baking sheet then pop them in the freezer for 10mins or so and they’ll peel off easily. Pesky little so and so’s! A very welcome discovery as I was rushing to get these salted caramel and white chocolate ones to the beautiful, beautiful people at 10:10 this afternoon.