botanical food colors

All-Purpose Powdered Sugar Icing–Good, Easy, Great for Cookies and Cakes

November 23, 2014 By Nancy Baggett 7 Comments

I have lots of icing recipes in my repertoire--most peeps who trained as pastry chefs do. My Kitchenlane archives contain several different buttercream ...

Cute Baby Carriage Shower Cookies

April 27, 2014 By Nancy Baggett Leave a Comment

This week I was busily baking and decorating a big batch of cut-out sugar cookies. As you can no doubt guess, the baby carriage cookies were created for a ...

Pastry Decorating the “Naturally Beautiful” Way–How to Avoid Synthetic Food Colors & Use Botanical Dyes

January 27, 2012 By Nancy Baggett 8 Comments

Over the past decade I’ve been exploring how to minimize the use of synthetic food dyes in my pastry decorating. In fact, all the icings pictured ...

Welcome to KitchenLane! It’s a comfortable place where I create, thoroughly test, and photograph recipes for my cookbooks and blog. All my recipes are original, not adaptations from others. I trained as a pastry chef, so many offerings are desserts and baked goods. Some are also healthful, savory dishes I contribute to healthy eating publications. My recipes are always free of artificial dyes, flavorings, and other iffy additives, which I won’t serve my family—or you! Instead, dishes feature naturally flavorful, colorful ingredients including fresh herbs, berries, edible flowers, and fruits, many from my own suburban garden or local farmers’ markets. Since lots of readers aspire to write cookbooks, I also blog on recipe writing and editing and other helpful publishing how-to info accumulated while authoring nearly 20 well-received cookbooks over many years.