Making baby blue icing is basically taking a blue color and toning it down a little to not be as bright. In this article I used blue and red to make baby blue, and I think it worked pretty well.
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What color of baby blue do you want?
Baby blue is a color that has a lot of shades, so make sure you and the client (if you’re making the cake for someone else) are thinking fo the same thing. This is really important because if a customer has a shade in mind and you make a different one, they won’t be happy. I use a paint color fan deck to find the colors that I want to end up with, but for baby blue you need basic primary colors, and you’ll be making a basic light blue first, then altering it to get the different shades.
The easiest thing would be to get some food coloring that was already baby blue. If you can’t find a baby blue color specifically, Americolor Wedgewood looks like a good choice. They’re already mixed to give you the tint that you want, but if you don’t have them, you can use blue and red to mix it.
You can get Americolor food coloring at Oasis Supply Company or Amazon. On Oasis Supply, you can use discount code REMEMBER10 to get 10% off your order!
I also used white icing for this, so unless you want to use a tiny bit of each color to keep your icing really light, you should have some white on hand to mix the darker icing into it.
What colors to use to make baby blue icing.
I started with Americolor Royal Blue. This is a good, basic primary color without a lot of other colors included, so it will give you a good bright blue color.
Start by mixing some blue icing, then add a little blue to it. You should start with a tiny, tiny bit, because baby blue is very light. Obviously, if you’re working with a full batch of icing you will be adding more color, but start with a little bit and add a little bit at a time.
I used the toothpick method to add the color so that I could control how much was going in, since this was a very small amount of icing.
This is the size of the dot of food coloring, it was teeny tiny.
Stir all of the color in well, making sure to scrape the bowl and the spatula to get all of the food coloring off and mixed in. This is going to give you a light blue color.
This light blue color is probably okay to use but it’s not 100% as pastel as I was looking for, so it was time to add some red, even though it’s scary to do it. Red will tone it down.
This is the difference between the icing and the paint color I’m going for. The royal blue icing is more like a sky blue on its own.
To see how to mix teal icing, click here. And for royal blue, click here.
Tone down the bright tone.
I added Americolor Super Red to tone down the icing.
Shop for Americolor Super Red at Oasis Supply (use discount code REMEMBER10 for 10% off)
Add a super tiny teeny little bit of red to the icing. I used a toothpick dipped into the food coloring bottle to control the amount of red I was adding.
Seriously, this was a tiny bit. I circled it in the photo to show how small an amount it was.
When I mixed the red in, this toned down the brightness of the icing to be a little more pastel.
Here’s the before and after of the color without the red and with the red. It’s interesting because the one with the red looks lighter than the one without, but that’s now color mixing works sometimes.
The final baby blue icing color.
This was pretty close to the paint swatch, and I could make it darker if I wanted to add some more red, but I decided to stop there. Adding more blue would brighten it up again and you’d have to add more red, which will make it a lot darker. Adding another tiny dot of red will make it a little darker without using more blue.
For an article about blue food coloring in different shades with comparing different brands, click here.
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