Does anyone know of a food coloring that is REALLY red? I've tried numerous brands of paste, gel

Does the dough bake up darker? I've always had good luck with the Wilton

gels for icing, but never done cookie dough.

For the liquid coloring, you have to add a lot of it to color dark red. My son loves making Red Velvet cake and the Betty Crocker recipe he loved to use called for an entire 1 oz bottle of it.

 
Call me anal (go ahead, I won't mind) but recipes that are as vague as this:

"Color 1 part green by drizzling a bit of the green color into the middle and knead until well blended" drive me crazy.

For the love of monkeys! Give an amount of how much food dye to use!!! Someone hired by the Huffington Post made the recipe and OBVIOUSLY knows how much they used OR Huffington photo-shop'd the finished product to look brighter.

I've got a lovely book "The Whimsical Bakehouse" and the author, God bless her, gives EXACT AMOUNTS of how many drops to use to get specific colors. She divides it into what is getting tinted: Buttercream icing (liquid gel colors) or white candy wafers (oil-based candy color).

Per 1/4 C of buttercream icing she adds 5 drops of red liquid gel. For 1/4 C of melted candy wafers, she uses 10 drops of oil-based candy coloring.

The book provides two buttercream recipes: one with part shortening and one all butter. Notes say that the color will be more vibrant with the shortening version.

Your recipe may present a bit of a challenge because it's all butter (lending more credence to the Photo-shop'd idea) or you might not be adding enough for a dough with 2 cups of butter. Would you consider using part Crisco to get the brighter color effect?

 
I posted this recipe because I couldn't find the Good Housekeeping one from the 60's that

I make. Sorry. I was too lazy to type the whole recipe out.
Last year I used half a jar of gel color but still dark pink. The year befoe was Wilton. I usually give up and go with the pink.

 
Marilyn might be right. Not a scientist, but I bought red glass goblets

one year from a company called Fire and Light. I found out later that the City of Arcata, CA put a stop to them making the red color that went into the glass because it had some sort of chemical that was being released into the air during the cooking process.

Probably a far-fetched comparison, but one never knows!

 
BA did an article on natural coloring

complete with recipes, no less. And they had a beautiful shade of red that they got from...beets! If you can't access the process, I'll go hunt down my issue (just got it a couple of days ago).

 
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