If you’ve ever wished your frosting tasted like fresh strawberries without the mess of pureeing fruit at 7 a.m., there’s a new baking product worth clearing some pantry space for this spring.

Whipzi Flavored Powdered Sugar is a line of flavored confectioners’ sugars that comes in strawberry, chocolate, vanilla, lemon, and orange, plus limited-edition flavors like salted caramel and lavender. The idea is simple: the flavor is already built into the sugar, so you skip the extracts, the fruit purees, and the extra steps. You just scoop and bake.

Sarah Farmer, executive culinary director at Taste of Home, has already been using it in her own kitchen. She and a colleague agreed that flavored confectioners’ sugars are, as they put it, a genius solution for adding flavor and color to recipes with minimal effort. When the product came up in conversation among the Taste of Home staff, several people in the Test Kitchen had already discovered it independently. That kind of word-of-mouth says something.

The comparison that keeps coming up is tomato paste in a tube, or browned butter sticks. Those are the products that make you feel a little foolish for not having them sooner. Whipzi fits that same category.

The strawberry version is the one getting the most attention right now.

It doesn’t taste artificial. The color comes from beet root rather than synthetic dyes, so when you mix it with water to make a simple syrup, you get a soft pale pink that Taste of Home described as reminiscent of pink lemonade. The flavor itself reads like real berries, not like a strawberry candy. If you want a deeper color for decorating, a few drops of food coloring will boost the hue without changing the taste.

For a quick strawberry frosting, you don’t need a recipe with six components. Strawberry Whipzi plus softened butter gets you a light, lightly fruity, pale pink frosting in the time it takes to soften the butter. That’s the whole list.

This is genuinely useful for families who bake on a schedule rather than a whim. Fresh strawberries in January aren’t great. Quality extracts are expensive and take up cabinet space for one recipe a year. Whipzi handles the out-of-season problem and the extract problem at once, which is why it makes so much sense for everyday home bakers rather than just enthusiasts. You can find the full breakdown of flavors and uses over at Taste of Home, where the Test Kitchen team has been putting the sugars through their paces in everything from crinkle cookies to French toast to meringues.

For suburban families who bake together on weekends, the flavored sugar opens up a lot of easy wins. Kids can frost sugar cookies with lemon Whipzi and water without needing to measure anything complicated. A Saturday morning scone glaze goes from a production to a two-ingredient project. The orange version stirred into a simple syrup could go over a loaf cake that you’d bring to a neighbor’s cookout without anyone knowing how little work it actually took.

Whipzi is available at World Market, which is where the product first caught attention, and it can also be ordered online. The limited-edition flavors rotate, so if you spot salted caramel or lavender on the shelf, it’s worth grabbing an extra bag. Standard flavors like chocolate, vanilla, and lemon are likely to stay in the regular lineup, but the seasonal ones come and go. The USDA’s guide to pantry staples is a helpful resource if you’re thinking about reorganizing your baking supplies around versatile ingredients that pull double duty, which is essentially what Whipzi is designed to do.

A good baking shortcut doesn’t replace skill. It just removes the friction that keeps people from starting. Flavored confectioners’ sugar doesn’t require you to learn a new technique or invest in equipment. You already know how to make a glaze. You already know how to frost a cupcake. Whipzi just means the strawberry version you’d been putting off because you didn’t have fresh berries is now a Tuesday afternoon project instead of a weekend commitment when the farmers market is open. For anyone who bakes with kids, bakes for church potlucks, or just wants the Saturday morning scones to have a better glaze, that’s a real and practical upgrade worth a spot on your pantry shelf.