So I’ve mentioned my current obsession with Amy Atlas’s dessert tables and my new mission for fabulus color-coordinated parties. In my continuing quest for this, I ordered some food coloring gels and powders to experiment with cookies and frosting. My vision is to make cookie balls that I can then enrobe in brightly colored royal icing.

So far I’ve just tried the cookies. And I decided to try dyeing those as well to see what I could get. I used Martha Stewart’s Ideal Sugar Cookies recipe, which was absolutely delicious. I was going for navy blue, but this was as close as I could get.

This is when things got interesting. I’d added a little black, but when I couldn’t get to navy blue I threw in a little yellow to try and get to green. No idea why I did this, but I ended up with delicious cookies in a very alien color.

I also didn’t refrigerate this batch of dough. I have another ball of dough in the fridge to play with, but when I baked my cookie balls they came out like this instead:

Delicious, alien-colored, non-balls. Next experiment will be better. I may try playing with shortbread for shapes.