How do I make red and blue cakes without using something that would send the DCs hyper?

[NotABanana]

TIA.

I wish you luck making blue cakes, NAB.

I had a go once, blue food colouring + yellow eggs = green cake. I never tried again. Heigh ho.

OTOH, I am having vague thoughts about beetroot juice and red cabbage water.

[goes and lies down in darkened room]

As BALD (!!) says, beetroot and cabbage are my first impulse.

Red is easy, you can use beetroot juice to colour the icing or the cake, i've used it on icing, certainly.

Blue ... well, the liquid from red cabbage is pretty blue ... but not that blue.

You can all laugh now. I want to help DS2 learn his colours and I thought this might be a fun way to do it!!

I think it is really hard to get natural blue colourings...which I guess is what you are after.

Smarties have only just found one (they removed hte blue so they could be colouring free, but it has just come back).

Also as Boys say - blue + yellow = green...so you would need loads of teh colouring to get over the green-ness.

The alternative is to do the icing (which starts white) in blue??

I believe that pastes are supposed to be better at giving a deep colour than liquids.

Blueberries

Well than he can learn that yellow + blue = green....

LOL

The icing idea is inspired.

Well done!!

Icing is much easier to colour (at least easier to get the colour you aim for). Just as much fun - if not mre fun cos he can help you bake the cakes and then throw icing and sprinkles around too.

Shout for the bunny she recommended a paste to me...

personally I would stick to making cute cupcakes without the colouring and then have fun painting food colouring on a second batch/half of them and send them off as a present for a friend/grandparent/neighbour!
My kids love messing with icing and colouring but DD2 suffers badly so we keep back a few plain ones and put choc buttons on hers so she still gets a "treat" without the headaches and hyperactivity that would follow a dose of colouring

OMG just read back moy post. Even for me that was crap grammar! My apologies

You could always mix blue smarties (the artificial-colour-free ones) into the cake mix?