Making green icing blue is tricky and takes a lot of food coloring. This buttercream frosting tutorial shows how I did it (kind of) and gives you the easiest alternatives for cake decorating with a blue/green food color palette.
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Can you mix colors to get primary colors?
You can’t really mix colors to get a primary color, which are red, blue, and yellow. Those three colors are the ones that you use to make up other colors, but you can’t mix the other ones together to get a pure primary color.
Since green is blue and yellow (click here to see that being mixed), starting with green would mean that you have to remove the yellow to get back to blue. And since you can’t remove a color from mixed icing, all you can do is try to get the color back to a more “pure” version of the color you’re going for.
The problem with this is that if you want to make green icing blue, you’ll need blue food coloring. And the more blue you add, the darker it’s going to get, so you’ll need white icing to lighten the color. And if you have white icing and blue food coloring, you might as well just use that to make the blue!
So there really is no easy way to make green icing blue, but if you’re determined to do it, I did it for you to show what happens, and this is how it turns out.
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Start with the green icing.
Start with a lighter green, because the more blue you add, the darker it’s going to get. Add a bunch of blue, there’s no reason to be gentle at this point, just dump a lot in!
This will give you a dark teal, but you want to try to get rid of as much of the green tint as possible, which basically means dumping more blue in.
Keep adding more blue.
Add more blue and mix that in. You’re going to get a change in the icing texture if you add too much, and if there’s too much food coloring in icing it can start to weep out of the icing when it’s on the cake. If you notice that the icing is looking really wet, it’s time to stop mixing it. If you have a powdered food coloring that’s meant for coloring icing, that can work, too.
See how ths icing here looks kind of wet, instead of grainy icing texture? That’s enough food coloring, don’t add any more.
Make the icing lighter.
Get your white icing and add a little of the dark icing into it. This is when you’ll get a better idea of what the actual dark color is, since it might have been hard to tell.
This is definitely teal, not blue. The green is still coming through and changing the tint, even with all of the blue I put into the dark icing.
I put in a lot more blue to move it into that direction.
Now it’s an ocean blue, which would work fine but it’s still got a green tint to it, and you might not want that. You would have to add some of this to more white, then add more blue to that, to get it to be more blue. Again, if you have white icing and blue food coloring, just use that to make blue icing, skip the green mixing!
The final color is this…It’s a nice ocean blue, but it’s not a primary blue color. So while you can make green icing blue, it involved things (white icing, blue food coloring) that would make blue icing a lot easier than trying to do it this way.
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For an article about mixing teal buttercream, click here.
Watch the video of the entire mixing process here:
