Ive been teaching myself how to decorate cookies, and the main issue I've been having is with color bleeding, which you can see on this one I made last week (ignore the messy flood on this one lol). It's not just the dark colors that do this to me — I made some kitty cookies as well, and the pink that I put on their noses and ears bled as well.
I use a medium flood to cut down drying time because I heard that can help, but it still bled. I've also tried not adding as much coloring, but when I tried that, I didn't get as vibrant of colors as I was looking for.
Any ideas what could be causing this? Tips to prevent it? TIA! 💕
by AshLikeFromPokemon
4 Comments
Things I do to avoid color bleed:
Whip my royal icing to stiff peaks when I’m making it. (I actually don’t know if this helps with color bleed specifically, but I feel like it probably can’t hurt).
Add white food coloring to my base royal icing. I use chefmaster liquid whitener.
For colors like black, I don’t make black. I make dark grey, and then it becomes black as it sits for several hours or overnight.
Use as thick of a consistency as possible.
So I never have color bleed (watch me jinx myself) and this is my full time business. I do a ton of bright and dark colors.(Checkout my profile, I do a lot of annoyingly bright cartoon characters)
Here are a few tips, some already mentioned:
-always add white food coloring to your icing when you make it. I always make a big batch of thick icing and then I can take some out of that and make the consistency I need.
-your icing is probably over saturated with food coloring.when I color my icing, I almost never start with white icing, unless I’m making a super pale/pastel color. I always save all of my leftover icing. I keep all of my leftover bags of icing in a big Freezer Ziploc bag in the freezer. Then when I need to make a new color, I grab from that bag what ever I have closest… So if I were to make black, I will grab all the bags of any color that have a tiny bit leftover and I don’t need right now. I mix those all together and hopefully I’m left with something that’s already dark and will only require a few drops of black food coloring. I stop adding coloring when it’s dark grey. It will darken after a bit.
-they need to dry for a loooong time. Whenever Im working on cookies, I have a table fan on high. Then the cookie spends at least 6hrs/preferably overnight with that fan blasting.
Hope this helps!
For black royal icing, I do master elite black by the sugar art. And I add some americolor black. That stopped color bleed for me. For other colors, add white, use a dehydrater, less food coloring, and let the icing sit a day or two to develop. I also noticed that the less humidity in the room, the better chance that there’s no bleed.
Adding white food coloring to the base color has always worked for me!