40 Recipes For All Your Mermaid Rainbow Aesthetic Needs

Hello and welcome to this thing we’re doing where we help you figure out what you’re gonna put in your mouth this week. Some of these are recipes we’ve tried, some of these are recipes we’re looking forward to trying, all of them are fucking delicious. Tell us what you want to put in your piehole or suggest your own recipes, and we’ll talk about which things we made, which things we loved, and which things have changed us irreversibly as people. Last week, we tucked you in with comfort food and made it better.

Sometimes I like my food the way that I enjoy my sexuality: unnatural. While I’m generally cautious about what I put in my mouth (yup), I’ve always had a thing for brightly coloured food, whether it’s artificially coloured candy floss from pasar malams (night markets) or the naturally occuring bizarreness of red cabbage (which gives you blue dye!). Now you might recall that a few weeks ago I taught you how to dye your hair all the unnatural colours you could possibly want, and what I didn’t say then is that if you dye your hair teal/purple/pink like I do, one of the most frequent comments you’ll get is that your hair looks edible. It’s not. Don’t try it. But for days when ordinary food colours just aren’t doing it for you, everything on this list is!

1. Vegan Andes Mints

2. Blue Raspberry Pineapple Slush

3. Cotton Candy Popcorn

4. Cotton Candy Meringues

5. Gluten, Egg and Dairy-Free Rainbow Donuts

6. Blue Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

7. Blueberry Crumb Bars

8. Blackberry Ombre Popsicles

9. Mashed Purple Sweet Potatoes

10. Vegan Purple Yam/Sweet Potato Chocolate Cake & Frosting

11. Red Cabbage Chips with Tomato Yogurt Dipping Sauce

12. Ube Macapuno Cake

13. Purple Sweet Potato and Cauliflower Soup

14. Blueberry Cupcakes with Blueberry Cream Cheese Frosting

15. Beet Braised Lentils

16. Beet-Strawberry Smoothie

17. Zingy Purple Potato Salad

18. Lavender Cupcakes with Honey Frosting

19. Purple Power Salad

20. Beetroot Risotto

21. Beet and Goat Cheese Pizza

22. Sweet and Sour Red Cabbage

23. 5-Minute Blueberry Coconut Frozen Yogurt

24. Blueberry Cardamom Cupcakes

25. Caramelized Onion and Beet Soup

26. Roasted Beet Pesto

27. Smoky Beetroot Hummus

28. Strawberries and Cream Cake

29. Raspberry Coconut Macarons

30. Healthy Red Velvet Fudge Protein Bars

31. Very Pink Raspberry Cosmopolitan

32. Strawberry Layer Cake with Whipped Strawberry Frosting

33. Strawberry Chocolate Chip Cookies

34. Pink Ribbon Cinnamon Rolls

35. Strawberry Pudding

36. Cotton Candy Creme Melts

37. Olaf the Snowman Snacks

38. Bluebird Cookies

39. Elsa’s Icy Blue Dessert Trifle

40. Red, White and Blue Candy Apples

This list was compiled with the help of my partner Natalie, who really wants “merbutch” to be a thing.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!

Fikri

Fikri has written 61 articles for us.

24 Comments

  2. Can I have all of it I’m so hungry, just seeing all the pictures with colors will open the appetite widely, thank you Fikri.

    • Excellent, because it might christen the blender someday. (And the top of my head maybe? The colour, not the soup.)

  7. These all look like they need to be in me asap. Also I just finished the last of my massive stash of Ube sweets that I brought with me when I moved back to the States and I am missing them tremendously! That cake is sooo tantalizing.

  8. Yuuuuuuuuuuuuum. Love that you included some foodstuffs that are naturally hued and some that are…less natural.

  10. I am just envisioning the spectacular gay potluck that could be organized with the help of these rainbow delights.

  11. i’d just like to express my disappointment that this post is not titled “40 Recipes for All Your Merbutch Rainbow Aesthetic Needs.” i’m looking at you, rachel.

    • (sorry I threw you under the bus re: the titling decision Rachel she made her scary face) (it’s a very cute face)

  12. Ooh I got some little things to share.

    Grab a colourful soda like Jones Blueberry Lemonade, a tall glass, and some vanilla ice cream. 
    Put a scoop or two at the bottom of the glass. Then pour your soda nice and slow cause it’s going to get real fizzy an foamy. 
    If you don’t have a tall glass a whiskey glass or a wine glass will do just use one little scoop. Or multiple spoonfuls, just don’t use a lot. Foam factor, dude, foam factor.

    Other thing, how to dye sugar cookies.
    Knead the dye into the dough which has had an hour or more of well wrapped rest. Gel based dye is the most vibrant. 

    There’s a risk of staining your kneading surface and you. Easiest way to avoid this is to saran wrap the shitout of a medium sized cutting board, wear poly or latex gloves and wear clothes you don’t care about.

     Make an indent in the dough. Here you will either drop or lightly slather your dye. Fold it over and knead it. The colour will start as a swirl. You could absolutely just leave it as a swirl. Either way wrap the dough and let it rest again before baking it.

    Super unnatural: cake mix cookies. Dye them or not they are straight up unnatural.
    Basically you add more flour or less wet to a cake mix to make the batter more like dough in consistency. Cake mix has a bunch of additives in it is partially how this works. These will cookies come sorta like Madelines, but the Kmart version.

  13. These are all so beautiful! (And a refreshing change from the autumn orange-ness pumpkin-spice overload. I was beginning to worry about turning orange from too much carotene!).

    …and I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t even know purple sweet potatoes existed. My life has been sorely lacking, apparently.

    • “…and I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t even know purple sweet potatoes existed. My life has been sorely lacking, apparently.”

      Me too! My local shop has just started selling them in the past week or two and at first I was like “whaaaaat?” but now that there are recipes for them I have to try them :D

Comments are closed.