If you need to make brown icing, whether it’s buttercream frosting or royal icing, you’ll need to use either brown food coloring, or all of the primary colors if you don’t have brown. I used red, yellow, and blue, which are the primary colors, and I got a good chocolate brown after a few different color combinations.
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Which brown color do you want to make?
If you have brown food coloring, use that! But you might not have any, so I used red, yellow, and blue to make these brown colors, and I started by deciding which brown I wanted to make. I wanted a basic dark chocolate brown that wasn’t too pink or yellow.
Since there are so many shades that people refer to as “brown” (taupe, tan, chocolate, etc.) you should get a color swatch so that you’re making the right color. 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, and for the sake of this test I used the basic primary colors instead of starting with a brown color. You can also put cocoa powder into your icing to get a brown color, but that will make the icing taste like chocolate, which might not be what you want. So start out with food coloring and no cocoa unless you want chocolate!
For this test I used Americolor Super Red, Royal Blue, and Lemon Yellow.
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!
To see everything I used specifically in this process, use my affiliate links on Amazon and Oasis Supply:
- Spatula set: https://amzn.to/4lrAIIO
- Americolor Lemon Yellow: https://collabs.shop/7dzlaz
- Americolor Super Red: https://collabs.shop/7dzlaz
- Americolor Royal Blue: https://collabs.shop/7dzlaz
Start slowly.
I used two drops of red, one yellow, and one blue to get started. The drops are going to be different sizes, but since this is a color that you want to make a base for first, you don’t need to be as delicate about adding color until you get to the end and want to tweak what shade it is.
You’re going to get a mess, but don’t worry, brown has all of the primary colors in it, so it will be fine once you add more color in later.
You’re going to get a basic taupe that isn’t too attractive, like a putty color. That’s your base that you will work with.
Start tinting the icing.
I added one more drop of red to make the icing more red, and this is what I ended up with. This is a more pinky-toned brown color, and it would work with a lot of wedding color schemed that I’ve done, especially when it’s paired with a pink color. I wanted to make it darker, though, so I kept mixing.
I added another drop of red and one blue, to make it darker. You’re basically adding purple to this mix since red and blue make purple, and it will tint the icing to a darker color. Make sure to stir the food coloring in really well before adding more so that you can make sure to see what color you’re working with.
Here you can see the difference between the last batch and the result of this mix. You can see that it’s a lot darker, and the one on the right is more blue/purple.
I added one drop of yellow to make sure it wasn’t going to get too purple, and it turned it a lot greener, so now I had to go back to the red to counteract the green!
This is what I ended up with after another drop of red…It’s still a little too green, so I decided to add some red and yellow because brown has a lot of orange in it, and I figured that I would see what would happen.
For a comparison of orange and brown food coloring, click here.
The final brown color.
Adding the red and yellow (orange) to the icing did the trick, and it made a perfect shade of brown that would work with any chocolate brown color combo. Pair this one with blue, pink, or orange and it will work perfectly.
Final color was 6 drops of red, 3 drops of yellow, and 2 drops of blue for about 1 cup of icing. I used Americolor Super Red, Royal Blue, and Lemon Yellow.
When you get the color a little lighter than the color you want, stop! It will get darker as the icing sits, and matching it exactly isn’t really required. If you really, really want to match it perfectly, you can do that, but you need to understand that it can get darker over time.
Watch the video of the process.
If you want to watch a video, you can see the back-and-forth that it takes to adjust the color a little at a time.
