Food colourings for cake icing

[TettyLouBar]

Hi there,
I'm making my own birthday cake for DD's 1st birthday. Nothing special, just a sponge cake, but I want to decorate it with a duck theme as she is obsessed with ducks!
So I'm looking for a child friendly yellow food colouring for the icing. Any ideas? are the regular ones in the shops ok to use?
(I know nothing about this subject)
I know that its a one off occasion and the children wont be eating that much, but I thought I'd ask what you yummy mummy cake experts do?

Hi, don't know about child friendly. I would tend to share your 'one-off' view, but food colouring pastes are much easier to use than liquid, you only need a little bit and they don't make the icing too runny.
I think the duck theme is lovely btw.

I've just made DS2s bday cake (he's 1 today), I did a bee theme, so made a normal round sponge, flat iced it and put a yellow behive on the top with his name and then made bees to go around the outside. I used the packets of ready coloured icing (Dr Oetker - in any supermarket), as I've found that even with paste colouring the icing gets a bit sticky, and is much messier. There are 4 colours in the box (black, red, yellow, green), but they have a really long shelf life so you can use the others for your Christmas cake!

agree with the paste idea - much easier

paste colours, definitely.

If you are worried about your DD eating the colouring (I wouldn't be, FWIW - colourings are fairly well regulated now and as a one-off it won't do any harm), just subtly remove the icing from her slice before she eats it - neither she nor anyone else will notice. TBH, I make lots of cakes and none of us much like the flavour of sugarpaste, so mostly the cake gets eaten and the icing gets left to be fed to the birds (let all those Mummy birds worry about the colourings )

awww, thanks peeps, she loves her duckys, so we're going with that as a theme, I purchased some yellow and orange paste earlier and will attempt a dry run of the cake next week (DD's party the following sunday and lots of yummy grannys and great grannys who are blackbelts in the art of cakery coming so has to be up to scratch!!!)

found some duck cake candles in Hobbycraft too! fabuloso!

cheers