B-san's Blog

Note: You’ll want to read the entire post to come to the same surprise ending as we did ??

My wife and I both like to cook. We like trying new recipes and then compiling the best dishes into our own recipe card box. Lately, I’ve been cooking breakfasts on my day off, and there is one recipe we both really like. The recipe book I originally found it in calles them Hot Biscuits. But I personally find the texture to be closer to a Scone.

Since I am allergic to wheat, and my wife doesn’t do too well with dairy, these biscuits are made with rice flour and soy yogurt. A bit of sugar, a bit of oil, a bit of corn starch, baking powder and baking soda, mix it in a bowl and you’re done! The recipe is simple, but this makes trying out new variations so fun! Some variations I’ve tried in the past are chocolate biscuits, cornmeal biscuits, and pink biscuits with chocolate chips. (Making something that reminded us of spring was the idea with that last one.)

I used red food coloring to get the pink in those last batch of biscuits. My wife and I were eager to see if there were healthier alternatives to your typical food colouring though. So a few days later, we went hunting in our local supermarket. And this is what we found…

Yes, natural food colorings! The green is 100% spinach powder, and the purple is 100% purple potato powder. This was exactly what we were looking for! So on my next day off, I decided to make two batches of these hot biscuits.

The hope was to get a plate of colorful biscuits for breakfast. I was expecting Green and Purple biscuits. But the food colorings had a mind of their own… ?

Making the biscuits went smoothly. I’ve just about memorized the recipe now, and enjoyed making two batches at once. I decided to add chocolate chunks to the green batch, and cashew nuts to the purple batch.

All was good even when I placed the biscuits in the oven. But 15 minutes later, I was totally caught off guard. The green batch… perfect! They looked so delicious!

The pink batch made me go… ?????

That was not the color I was expecting, not at all! It barely even looks like food anymore! Just for comparison, this is what color the purple potato powder looked like.

To be honest, my wife and I had a good laugh that morning through breakfast. We definitely got a plate of colorful biscuits that morning… Just not the colors we were expecting.

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Well, I thought about it and concluded, it must have been the baking soda reacting with the purple potato. Remember the science experiments you did in school, where purple cabbage juice changes color based on acidity? (Was it just my class that did that? ?) I figured the baking soda must be making the biscuit alkaline, turning the pink powder blue.

So, with the aim of redeeming myself, I set out and made another batch of pink biscuits on my very next day off. This time, I made sure to remove the baking soda. And this is how it turned out. This is the biscuit before going in the oven…

And this is how it looked after 15 minutes. (I kept one of those “pink” cookies from the last batch for comparison.)

A lot better! But still, there was this faint tint of blue on the biscuits. There was just enough blue to make you go Eek! if you didn’t know the back-story to it all.

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I finally gave up and decided to read up on how to keep the biscuits pink. It turns out, my theory about the acidity was actually correct. But I was one step short. You actually have to add a little lemon juice to the mix to get the right acidity and keep the powder pink. I haven’t tried that yet, but I’ll be sure to post some photos here, once I finally get it right ?

Thanks for Reading!