In this green icing color mixing demo I make green buttercream frosting with only yellow and blue, which are the two primary colors that make green. If you don’t have green food coloring, you can still achieve green with primary colors, and you’ll learn how to make green color icing with basic food coloring here. This is a basic spring green, and you’ll see how to adjust the color to make a citrus green that’s more yellow for your cake decorating designs. Making green icing is pretty easy, it’s getting the right shade of green that can get tricky.
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What color green do you want?
Green 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 green you need basic primary colors, and you’ll be making a basic green first, then altering it to get the different shades.
The easiest thing would be to get some food coloring that was already green. They’re already mixed to give you the tint that you want, but if you don’t have them, you can use 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!
I decided to go for this basic bright green that would be a good base for mixing other colors later. To see how to get more of a sage color, click here: How to make sage green icing.
What colors to use to make green icing.
I started with Americolor Lemon Yellow and Royal Blue. These are good, basic primary colors without a lot of other colors included, so they’ll give you a good bright green color.
Start by mixing some bright yellow icing, or if you want a softer green use a little yellow to keep it lighter. You should start with yellow, not blue, because it’s going to be easier to make the icing darker by adding a little blue then it would be to lighten blue to a green color.
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.
Add a little bit of blue to the yellow. This was one drop, but I could have used a toothpick dipped into the food coloring bottle to control the amount of blue I was adding.
When I mixed the blue in, it gave me this nice green color, so that was perfect for what I wanted.
I got pretty lucky with this, it ended up really accurate compared to the paint cards. I decided to try to make a version that was brighter and more yellow, closer to the color on the far left.
Making a yellow green icing color.
To brighten the green and make it more yellow, I added a few drops of the yellow into the icing. Since it’s pretty impossible to lighten icing that’s dark by adding a light color, I’m just looking to create a different tint at this point.
Mix the yellow in, and it will change the color a little.
I’m moving up toward the color on the left, but since the green that I started with was dark, it’s not moving that much. It was definitely more yellow, but not dramatically different.
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Lighten the icing color.
To lighten the icing, I added some white icing into the green.
After mixing it up it was a little bit lighter, but the green is still overpowering the white because there’s more of it to begin with.
I decided to add a little of the green to the white icing that was left in the bowl. That was what I should have been doing to begin with…It’s a good idea to make a small amount of the darker color that you can mix into the white icing to get the color that you want. That way, you can have a base of the darker icing that you can use to make more of the color that you actually want if you end up needing more of it. It’s a lot easier to do that than it is to mix the color from scratch and try to match it.
That gave me a nice light green, but it still wasn’t as yellow as I wanted it to be. It’s easier to adjust now, though, because the yellow is going to mix a lot better into the lighter green than it would in the darker.
Add more yellow.
Now I can add more yellow and adjust the tint to be more of a citrus green.
That ended up pretty well, but I wanted it to be a little greener, so I added some more of the darker icing.
Having the darker icing available meant that I didn’t need to even worry about the food coloring and trying to get the right amount. I added about a Tablespoon full, and mixed that up, and it worked fine.
It’s not as electric a color as the paint swatch, but it’s definitely a good citrus green. Adjusting the color of green is easy if you’re using the darker and adding it to white, then going from there to add yellow or blue to make it lighter or darker. Adding more blue would have made the icing into a teal color since that’s a combination of green and blue.
For an article about mixing teal buttercream, click here.
Watch the video of the entire mixing process here: