Colored sprinkles rewards a little know-how: how to choose them, cook them, store them, and substitute in a pinch. Browse 23 recipes to cook with them.

What are colored sprinkles?

Colored sprinkles are tiny pieces of sugar and starch, tinted and hardened, scattered over baked goods for color and a faint crunch.

They are decoration first and flavor second. Most taste lightly sweet and a little waxy, with the real job being how they look.

The catch-all word covers a few different shapes, and they are not interchangeable. Knowing which is which saves you a muddy-looking cake or a batch of cookies where the color ran.

The Main Types

Jimmies are the little rod-shaped sprinkles, soft enough to bite, the classic topping for an ice cream cone or a frosted cupcake. Their color is fairly stable, so they hold up well pressed into buttercream.

Nonpareils are the tiny round balls, the ones that bounce everywhere off the counter. They look great on cookies and candy, but their thin coating bleeds the moment it meets anything wet, so keep them off uncooked frosting you plan to spread.

Sanding sugar is coarse colored sugar crystals, not a true sprinkle. It gives sparkle and crunch rather than shape, and it is the right choice when you want a sugar-cookie edge to glitter, as on Decorative Sugar Cookies.

Dragees and confetti quins round out the family: the silver metallic balls and the flat disks and shapes used for holiday and themed bakes.

Using Them Without a Mess

With sprinkles, timing is everything.

Apply them while the frosting or glaze is still tacky so they stick, or scatter them over cookie dough just before baking, the way Decorative Sugar Cookies and Drop Sugar Cookies do.

For decorating set or crusted frosting, press gently so they embed instead of rolling off. To coat the sides of a cake, hold it over a tray and press handfuls into the frosting, letting the tray catch the rest.

Sprinkles also go inside the batter. Funfetti-style cakes, Candy Rainbow Bread for Bread Machine, and the dough for Struffoli all fold them in, and they stud Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes baked right in their cones.

Pairing and Common Mistakes

Sprinkles suit anything that reads as fun: sugar cookies, cupcakes, doughnuts, ice cream, and Italian treats like Struffoli or Taralli Cookies, where they crown a honey or glaze coating.

The number one mistake is color bleeding. Nonpareils and many bright sprinkles are coated in water-soluble dye, so mixed into a wet batter or left on damp frosting they leech streaks of color and turn the surface gray.

To fold sprinkles into a batter without it going muddy, choose jimmies, which are more bleed-resistant, and stir them in at the very last second before the batter goes in the pan. The less time they spend wet, the cleaner the color stays.

The other slip is adding them too late, after a glaze has set, so they simply will not stick. Catch the frosting while it is still tacky.

Buying and Storage

Sprinkles are sold by type and by theme, so match the shape to the job: jimmies for buttercream, sanding sugar for sparkle, themed quins for a holiday.

Read the label if you avoid certain dyes or want a no-artificial-color version. Note too that some metallic dragees are sold for decoration only, not eating.

Because they are mostly sugar, sprinkles keep almost indefinitely if you keep them dry. Store them sealed in a cool, dark cupboard away from humidity, which is the one thing that clumps them or dulls the color.

Kept that way they stay good well past a year, though the brightest colors fade slowly over time, so buy festive shades closer to when you will use them.

Quick facts

In Chinese

颜色洒

British (UK) term

Colored sprinkles

en français

arrose couleur

en español

confites de colores

Recipes using colored sprinkles

There are 23 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 23 recipes