I always use pure vanilla extract in my icing as it tastes much better. I want my icing though to remain white, any ideas on what vanilla or brands/types/tips as to what I can use to keep my icing white?

No advice other than deciding are aesthetics more important than flavour?  To me there is no comparison, flavour is always more important than appearance.  However, clear “vanilla” is available if you decide to use it.

You can make colorless vanilla sugar at home. Take two or three vanilla pods and soften them by steaming them gently. Then cover them with sugar and seal the container for a couple of days. The resulting sugar acquires a strong vanilla flavor. When you use the sugar in baking it won’t color.

Add a TINY bit of purple gel to the icing and I mean tiny. . . little at a time. The purple offsets the yellow of the extract/butter somehow, I don’t know the exact reason. :p Let it beat for a little longer than normal at the lowest speed. I don’t use artifical vanilla and this works pretty well for me.

Adding the purple must be something like the concept of how bluing makes things more white ... except when they use too much of it on hair, which I’m sure we’ve all seen!!!

Anne if your decorator has blue hair, don’t get your cakes there!! LOL

Bernadette - 10 March 2011 09:32 PM

The purple offsets the yellow of the extract/butter somehow, I don’t know the exact reason.

Purple and yellow are complementary colors (so are red/green and blue/orange), which means if you lie them next to each other each makes the other look more vivid.  But if you mix them, they do indeed “cancel” each other out and produce grey.  Artists often mix in tiny dabs of complementary colors when they want to soften and enrich the paints they are working with.