Hi Rose,

My religion restricts the consumption of any alcohol.  I am a cake decorator and I would like to cater to my religious community. I am having difficulty finding a non-alcoholic medium to use when painting fondant.  I looked for non-alcoholic lemon extract and I have just found Lemon oil. I am not sure if the lemon oil will evaporate. If I use water, it will melt the fondant, do you know of any non-alcoholic alternatives which I can use?

Thank you!!

Hi-

The lemon oil could be tricky. I really don’t think it will evaporate, and some brands are really strong and would taste nasty in the amounts you would use for painting. I’ve used reconstituted egg whites as a thinner for paste colors.

Cathy

lemon juice should give you the same results as alcohol. some bakers prefer it.

jen

Thank you! Would that be the Lemon Juice from concentrate or fresh lemon juice? Have you tried it before? If so, do you have any tips when using it?

Are you allowed to use extracts in your cooking?  If so, lemon extract would be my first suggestion as a substitute for the vodka that many decorators use.  I use both, the lemon extract dries noticeably faster than the vodka.

If you cannot use extracts, then you need something that will allow you to dissolve color (either concentrated paste color or the dusts such as pearl dust, luster dust, etc) without clumping - water alone doesn’t work. Oils won’t dry (which means they’ll rub off) and I wonder about lemon juice, it might change the color for some things.

Hi Jeanne,

I cannot use anything which contains alcohol and lemon extract contains alcohol. I have not tried using lemon juice yet, I hope it does not change the color. Is there anything else that I could try using which would dry quickly?

What makes the extract work is the alcohol that evaporates, leaving the color behind.  You need something that will evaporate, and although I’ve heard of non-alcoholic extracts, I can’t find a lot of info about them.  You could use the spray colors from PME that are newly available in this country (PME is an English sugarcraft company) but I’ve found them to be expensive ($10/can and you can only get one wedding cake out of a can) and I don’t know what they use for a propellant, it might be alcohol too.

If you are painting on details (vines, leaves, flowers maybe) you could get away with using airbrush color (it will eventually dry, but not too fast) or diluting paste or gel color and applying it sparingly.  The gel or paste “paint” won’t dry, but so long as you don’t touch or retouch the area you could get by with that.

Painting on the entire cake, though, is a different matter and you’d probably need to invest in an airbrush.  I know that CalJava (aka Sweet Inspirations) sells pearlized airbrush colors now if you are looking to get that satin-y pearlized shimmer on the whole cake.

“I cannot use anything which contains alcohol and lemon extract contains alcohol. I have not tried using lemon juice yet, I hope it does not change the color. Is there anything else that I could try using which would dry quickly?”

the lemon juice will be fine. you can use concentrate, straight out of the bottle. i’ve used both. Margaret Braun recommends using either in her book Cakewalk.  does it matter that the alcohol evaporates and no alcohol is left behind to be consumed?

jen

I’ve used watered down corn syrup.  It works nicely especially with luster dust.  Use it sparingly and allow extra time to dry…Let us know what you try…Leandra