I'm Biggie: avid cook, speedy lunch packer, mom in San Francisco, & former expat fluent in Japanese. 
« « The Waxpaper Transfer Technique | Main | Vacation bento lunches & food sculpture centerpieces » »
Edible Paint
Please welcome guest author Amorette (Sakurako Kitsa), who is writing a series on how to make decorative art bento lunches. ~Biggie
The beautiful natural coloration of foods is always best, but you can also accent a bento with edible “paint”. I use it from time to time. The paints in the palette above are made from sour cream, which is just one option. Read on for some pointers on painting with foods and what to expect from the different types you’re working with.
Most of my painting is done with sour cream, yogurt, vanilla pudding and cream cheese. They take on color well and mix fairly smoothly, but each one has its pros and cons.
Yogurt/Sour Cream
Pros: Smooth, thin, bright color, easy to tailor to your dietary needs.
Cons: Has a nasty habit of separating and becoming watery.
Vanilla Pudding
Pros: Smooth, bright color, comes in regular, fat-free and sugar-free, easy to mix right in the cup.
Cons: Turkey or cheese painted with vanilla pudding can taste a bit weird.
Cream Cheese
Pros: Bright color, sticks where you put it, mixes well with the flavors of lots of foods.
Cons: Slightly rougher texture, more difficult to paint with.
I’ve made some streaks of “paint” on a piece of American cheese for comparison. On the left are a brush-stripe and a toothpick-stripe made with cream cheese. The stripes on the right are made with sour cream. Do you see the difference in brightness and texture? This is why I prefer to use the cream cheese most of the time.
Brush types make a big difference, too. All of these wiggly shapes are made with food-safe cake decorating brushes in cream cheese. Like regular paintbrushes, quality makes a big difference. The yellow craft-store brush makes a patchy line; the three specialized fondant brushes on the right are more consistent. Always make sure to handwash your brushes well after painting with food, by the way…you don’t want to introduce bacteria into your next project!
Also keep in mind that the substance you’re using as paint must vaguely match what you’re painting on, or else it could melt away. Use fat-based paints like sour cream and cream cheese on similar solids, like sliced cheese. I’ve found that cheese-on-cheese painting seems to produce the brightest and longest-lasting results.
For watery foods, it’s best to use your food coloring (natural juice or manufactured) as a sort of watercolor. Here I’ve made lines on an apple (above) and an egg (below) so you can see how straight-painted food coloring behaves. For lighter color, dilute with water. Remember that the brighter the color of straight-painted food coloring, the bigger the risk you run of coming away from lunch with a blue mouth.
You can see paint work on an apple on the sides of my tree frog bento. Watery foods will tend to feather and soften their color over time, so you might find that the boldly-drawn lines on your hard-boiled egg have been absorbed and are showing through as gentle pastels. That’s just the way egg behaves.
Here’s my black food coloring in his lonely little isolation tank. Black food coloring can be beautiful and very useful, but I tend to treat the stuff like a level 4 biohazard. It stains everything it touches and a little goes a long, long way. I open the bottle with paper towels and deal with a drop or two at a time in a small dish. When I’m finished, the bottle gets closed with paper towels and goes back into the box-within-a-box. If you’ve ever had a bottle of black food coloring spill in your cupboard, you know why. Squid ink is healthier, yes, but I’m allergic to it, so I’ve had to come to terms with this stuff.
Anyway, back to painting. I’m going to do a quick cheese-on-cheese painting here (cream cheese paint on a piece of American cheese) to show you how well it performs. I cut the American cheese into a t-shirt…let’s tie-dye it.
Using one of the nicer fondant brushes (the squared one), I picked up a little purple cream cheese and made a spiral by gently daubing the “paint” onto the American cheese. Daub, daub, daub, around and around. Once I finished with the purple, I picked up a bit of pink, and so on. Just follow the spiral around and overlap the colors slightly to make it look more authentic.
Here’s the finished product. Cover and stick in the fridge for a few minutes (I kept the plastic off the surface by surrounding the cheese with big-handled paring knives). Pry it gently off the plate (don’t worry too much about little cracks, you can hide them) and lay it on your COOLED bento (hot rice will make the shirt go bye-bye very quickly).
See? Not that hard, just a little time-consuming.
Ok, that’s all for me! Thanks for hanging out with me this week. 
Welcome back, Biggie, we all missed you!
FURTHER READING:
- All posts by Amorette on Lunch in a Box
- Decorative Food recipes
- Bento FAQ or Biggie’s Top Speed Tips
September 6th, 2008 | Categories: Amorette, bento, decorative, tips, tutorial or how to | 
Print This Post
| 
Email this post
« « The Waxpaper Transfer Technique | Main | Vacation bento lunches & food sculpture centerpieces » »
Loading ...
September 6th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Thank you so much for sharing all your tips!!!! Really useful good ideas — making picture bento seem like something I might actually be able to tackle instead of just gawk at
September 6th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Very creative! I suppose fruit and candy have trained me that pretty paste; colours are sweet. For that reason, the pudding appeals to me much more than the sour cream.
September 6th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Thanks so much! I’ve loved reading all your ideas.
I always tell my son, “nothing blue!”, but maybe I’ll reconsider using a little blue “paint” for his must-have blue Pokemon.
September 6th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
looks like a lot of fun to try! I’m going to have to get some food coloring and experiment *evil grin*
I think coloring icing for a custom desert would be kinda fun too! and cookie icing is kinda runny so it might work okay on dry foods
September 6th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Once I accidently put the lid for the corn syrup on my black paste color (and the black lid on the syrup). Obviously it wasn’t a secure lid and there was black everywhere - all over all the other colors and supplies (I’m a cake decorator, too.) HUGE mess. The top of the blue Americolor gel wasn’t secure once, too……I know all about stains! After I make a cake, my hands are all sorts of funky colors!
September 6th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Thanks again for the kind comments…
Jaguarrior: I used to use cookie icing and soft fondant for drawing designs on top of pudding. It works, if it’s not tinted. If it is tinted, I’ve noticed that the color separates. I packed a pudding with pink squiggles and got one with pink-and-white.
Monica: I feel your pain, lol!
September 6th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
thanks so much for sharing this. I have been trying to figure out how food painting is done since forever !!! I see them on great Japanese blogger mom’s sites but I could only drool at the pictures since I can’t read Japanese
September 7th, 2008 at 6:33 am
How fun and creative!!
September 7th, 2008 at 7:31 am
if i want to use cream cheese for the ‘painting’ how do i get colored paint? add fd coloring or juice to the cream cheese n mix?
September 8th, 2008 at 1:13 am
thank you so much! im probably not going to use any of this anytime soon, but it really gives me an appreciation for the kinds of things that you amazing food artists do!
September 8th, 2008 at 4:10 am
YL: All you have to do is add in a little food coloring, natural or synthetic, your choice
The proportions you see in the article are one drop of coloring to one ounce of cheese or sour cream (I mix in one-ounce cups)
September 8th, 2008 at 7:06 am
That’s really freaking cool =D
September 8th, 2008 at 9:00 am
This is a thank you to Biggie for inviting Amorette to be the guest of the week. Really fabulous ideas and beautiful results. Amorette, you are talented!
September 8th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Amorette
What are the natural food colorings I can use? I prefer to use natural food rather than synthetic
September 8th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Well, as some people earlier mentioned, there is the India Tree brand of colorings. They’re natural and they claim to be odorless and tasteless (in one sense of the word), but I have heard of a few complaints, especially the turmeric-based one.
Juices, such as beet juice, are always an option, but may not be as concentrated.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Wow, that is so cool! I`ve done some fingertip coloring with egg whites (making blue eyes on rounds of egg white), but never thought of mixing it with yogurt or cream cheese to paint with. We eat a lot of cream cheese, so I`ll have to try that!
September 11th, 2008 at 4:51 am
Cool! Peace love and bento. Painting is an added treat and for the food presentation.right?
September 11th, 2008 at 6:38 am
Amorette, this is really creative and something I never would have come up with. Excellent post and how-to!
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:37 am
Have you ever considered trying to use mayonnaise?