If you need to make coral icing, whether it’s buttercream frosting or royal icing, you’ll need to use either coral food coloring, or a couple of basic ones if you don’t have that. Even if you have a coral color to start with, knowing the basics of mixing shades of coral will be something that you’ll have to know if you need to get close to a specific shade of coral!
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Which coral color do you want to make?
If you have coral food coloring, use that! But you might not have any, so I used red and yellow to make these coral colors, and I started by deciding which coral I wanted to make. Even if you have coral icing, you might need to adjust your shade using the tips here.
Since there are so many shades that people refer to as “coral” (pink, orange, tangerine, 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 coral color.
For this test I used Americolor Super Red and Lemon Yellow. Super Red has a lot of orange tint to it, and Lemon Yellow is a very pure yellow, so neither of them has a lot of blue tint in them, which we don’t need for this coral color.
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
Start slowly.
I added some Super Red with a toothpick get started. I used toothpicks for this batch since red is a color that goes from light to dark really fast, and the toothpicks give you more control over how much you’re putting in, vs dropping it from the bottle. Never dip the icing toothpick back into the food coloring bottle, use a clean one each time so that you don’t contaminate the food coloring!
This starts out with a light pink color, which is perfect for the base to get started, because it’s a more orange pink than it is blue, and we want to end up with an orange that has a lot of pink in it.
Now I added a tiny bit of yellow to get an orange color.
This was a nice, light orange that was kind of coral since it started out with a pinky orange color.
Start tinting the icing.
I added more red to make the icing darker orange.
Stirring well to make sure all of the food coloring was added in evenly (really scrape the bowl and the spatula), it’s getting darker. Really make sure to stir the food coloring in before adding more so that you can make sure to see what color you’re working with.
Now I added more red and more yellow so that the color would stay in the orange range and not go back to being totally pink. Don’t add too much of each color, keep it a small amount. You can always add more color but if you put too much in it’s hard to go back!
Stirring this up definitely made it get darker and kept it orange, not pink. It does have a pink tint, which is fine.
At this point I thought that the orange was a good color, but I did want to start getting it to be that pinky orange color that coral is, so I added a little more red. I kept adding a tiny bit more red until it was the color that I was aiming for.
Adding the Super Red will keep darkening the icing, and since it has more orange than blue, it won’t make it turn purple at all, it will keep it in the range of pinky orange, which is what we want.
For an article showing how to mix hot pink icing, click here.
The final coral color.
Adding the additional red to the icing did the trick, and it made a perfect shade of coral that had enough pink/red in it to look coral and not orangey-orange. This color is tricky because coral is definitely an orange color, but it has a lot of pink in it and you need to control that.
You could also add some pink to the orange to adjust the color if you needed to do that!
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.
This shows the comparison of the colors from when I started mixing it to when I finished. The final colors aren’t tremendously different, but the color is definitely slightly pinker each 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.