Making burnt orange icing is easy if you use basic primary food coloring, but you need to do it carefully because red is such a strong color. If you follow these steps you’ll be able to make burnt orange frosting with basic food coloring and not end up with something that’s too dark.
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Which burnt orange color do you want?
Burnt orange 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) is thinking of the same color that you are. 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 burnt orange you need the basic primary colors, and you’ll be making orange first, then altering it.
The easiest thing would be to get some food coloring that was already brown or orange. They’re already mixed to give you the tint that you want, but if you don’t have them, you can use red, blue, and yellow to mix them.
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!
Mixing the icing.
I started with Americolor Lemon Yellow, Royal Blue, and Super Red, plus orange icing that I had made using the same colors. You can see the orange mixing article by clicking here. I started by adding more red to the orange icing to make it darker.
Mix the icing up and make sure that all of the color is incorporated. When you have a good dark orange color base, it’s time to start adding the red in carefully.
Add the red food coloring.
Use a toothpick to get a little bit of the red so that you can start making it darker CAREFULLY. Red is such a strong color, it will change the color dramatically fast if you add too much at once, so don’t do that. Use a toothpick to add a tiny bit of color at a time. If you have a large pot of icing that you’re coloring all at once you don’t need to be so delicate.
Add a little red and set the toothpick aside for later. Don’t put the toothpick into the food coloring after you put it in the icing, or it will contaminate your food coloring! Stir it in well so that no streaks of color are still there.
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Add a little blue to make brown.
Add a tiny bit of blue to make the color into more of a brown tone so that you can start getting it to the burnt orange tone. Mix this up and check the color.
Add a tiny bit of blue, not too much.
Mix this in and brown down the orange color.
Add more red to get it back to a darker orange.
Add more red, because now we’re getting it back to an orange shade. Mix it all up and make sure to scrape the bowl and the spatula well so that any food coloring that’s lingering on the surfaces will get mixed in. If you don’t, you’ll get streaks of color in the final icing and that can ruin the cake.
Here we have a sort of burnt orange color but it’s still pretty light, so I’m going to keep adding red.
I added more red than the last amount this time, because once you get the color started and you see how the amount of red that you’re adding works, you can get a little more aggressive.
Stir it up really well, scrape the bowl and spatula, and make sure that all of the color is mixed in.
This ended up with a good burnt orange color that was dark enough for my liking. I could have stopped with the lighter color, or anywhere in between by not adding as much red in between the two, but this one ended up pretty well.
Then I decided to add some more red because I wanted to try to get it to the darker color on the paint card. I put some more in and mixed the last bit up, and it worked really well.
It’s a little hard to tell, but as I added more red the icing definitely got more orange and less brown.
The final addition of red made the icing match the last color on the paint card, so I had my burnt orange and it was perfect. If I wanted one of the other colors that were a little lighter that would have worked by not adding the last red addition, but adding it made it exactly what I was going for.
So basically, you want to start with an orange color and brown it down, then bring it back up by adding red to it. You could use brown food coloring, orange, or red to do this, but the primary colors will work fine.
How to make orange icing video:
You can watch me making it here: