If you need to make purple icing, whether it’s buttercream frosting or royal icing, you’ll need to use either purple food coloring, or red and blue if you don’t have purple. There’s more than that to it, too, because purple is a color that’s really finicky and will change on you really easily!
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Which purple color do you want to make?
If you have purple food coloring, use that! But you might not have any, so I used red and blue to make these purple colors, and I started by deciding which purple I wanted to make. Some shades are more red and some are more blue, so I wanted to get something pretty much in the middle.
Purple is a really difficult color because the food coloring will fade. Red is a volatile color that can fade out quickly, and depending on which brand of coloring you use, you might end up with blue instead of purple. Make sure to give your icing time to sit before you need to use it, since it will be too late if you put it on the cake and it changes after that!
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 purple color.
For this test I used Americolor Super Red and Royal Blue.
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 Super Red: https://collabs.shop/7dzlazv
- Americolor Royal Blue: https://collabs.shop/7dzlaz
Start slowly.
I used a little red to get started. I used the toothpick method of dipping the toothpick into the food coloring bottle for this so that I could control the amount of color each time. Don’t put the used toothpick into the food coloring bottle again, it will contaminate the color! Use a clean toothlick each time you put it into the bottle.
Get a basic pink base to start.
Once you have a good pink color, you’re ready to start adding the blue. You can also use pink food coloring to start instead of red!
Start tinting the icing.
I added a little blue next, to make the icing purple. This was the Americolor Royal Blue.
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. You want to make sure that you’re getting rid of all of the streaks in the icing from food coloring that’s not mixed in completely.
Here you can see the difference between the last batch and the result of this mix. It’s getting a violet tint as the blue mixes in.
I added more blue to keep making it more purple.
This is what I ended up with after more blue…These are the colors in sequence as the blue gets mixed in more.
For a cake piped with purple and black icing, click here.
Keep adding more blue.
Add more blue to get the color darker.
That time it turned REALLY blue, so it was time to start adding more red. As the color gets darker you’ll have to go back and forth adjusting the shade that the icing is, and it will get a little darker each time.
Add more red.
Now it’s time to add more red, and you should do this a tiny bit at a time. Red is a strong color and it doesn’t take much to really shift the color, so go slow.
A little red has started to make the icing more purple and less blue, so it’s going in the right direction. Add a little more red and keep mixing.
Now the color is purple and would work well.
The final purple color.
Here’s a look at the progression of color. If you wanted to change the tint of the icing more, keep mixing in more of whatever color you want to add to make it darker or more blue or red.
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.