My husband came home one day and said that they had this good cake at work, and it had naturally flavored frosting.  He really enjoyed the flavor and wanted to try making our own.

After some discussion and research on which foods are used for dying different colors, we decided to use blueberries.  Blueberries are a darker color and we were curious as to what color it would create and how it would taste.  My husband spent over an hour hand squeezing and straining a pint of blueberries.  It was a messy job… but someone had to do it.

After the blueberries were strained four times, to ensure that the blueberry sauce was nice and smooth, I slowly started adding it to my dairy-free buttercream to see how the color and flavor changed. I added the blueberry sauce 1/2 tsp at a time to see how the color and flavor changed.  After 4 tsp, I stopped adding blueberry sauce because we were starting to taste a small berry flavor in the icing.  The icing image is the color of the icing before we stopped.  It is a nice pastel pink color.

We refrigerated the icing, and tasted it daily over the last few days.  My husband really likes it.  The berry flavor has come out a little more, but not too much that I would call it a blueberry icing.  Overall, the experiment was a success.

This has led to some discussions and additional research at The Treehouse about integrating a natural flavoring option into our products.  While the blueberry idea was fun, I don’t know if it’s realistic to spend that much time squeezing fruit every time someone orders a naturally flavored cake. There are several additional options, and more research to be done.  Look for natural flavors to come to The Treehouse at some point.