If you need to make teal icing, whether it’s buttercream or royal icing, you’ll need a couple of basic colors. This is a fairly easy color to make, but you need to go slowly!
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Which food coloring to use.
If you have a teal food coloring you should just use that. Turquoise is also very close, so that could work. But if you don’t have the specialty colors you can use a basic green and blue to get a teal color.
Teal is a very greenish blue color, but since there are so many shades that people refer to as “teal,” 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 in this case I would need green and blue to mix these shades.
The easiest thing would be to get some food coloring that was already teal or turquoise, like these Americolor shades. They’re already mixed to give you the tint that you want, but if you don’t have them, you can use green and blue 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!
If you don’t have a specific teal color, you can use any bright green and blue food coloring to mix teal. You don’t want to use muted colors for this, they should be pretty “pure” as far as the color that you start with goes. I used Americolor leaf green and Americolor royal blue for this.
Since green is made of blue and yellow, I started with the blue and added green to it, but it the teal that you’re trying to get is more green, you can start with the green. Make sure to go slow and only do a little bit at a time, or you can end up getting it too dark, and that’s hard to fix.
If you don’t have green food coloring, you can start with blue and yellow to make green. Click here to see how to make green icing the right way!
Start slowly.
Add a little bit of blue to start, and use a toothpick to dip it into the food coloring container instead of dropping it out of the bottle. That way, you can add a little bit at a time and control how much food coloring you’re putting in at one time. Don’t put a toothpick that you’ve inserted into icing back into the food coloring bottle, that can contaminate the color, just use a clean toothpick each time.
When you get the icing mixed up consistently with no color streaks, see if you want to make it a little darker, or add the green.
Use a toothpick and add a little green into the blue icing.
Start with a little and add more as you go so that you don’t throw the color balance off too much at once.
As you add the green, it will tint the icing to a teal color. You might have to add more blue and green alternately to get the color to go in the direction that you want.
Check the color as you’re working to see if it’s too green or too blue. This was after mixing the green in, and it was a little too green for my liking. I added more blue to make it go back in that direction.
Add more blue to the icing if you need to adjust, and stir that in thoroughly. Make sure that you’re scraping the bowl and spatula so that no streaks of food coloring are left over that aren’t mixed in well, or it can ruin a smooth icing finish later.
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. I matched this one pretty well to the third color from the top, so that’s where I would have stopped if I was trying to match that color.
You can always add more color later if it’s not dark enough, but if it gets too dark it will be hard to fix.
For a comparison of blue food coloring, click here.
How to make dark teal icing.
To make a darker version of this color, you basically have to keep adding more food coloring, there’s no real trick to it other than that.
I added a lot more blue to get this started, and then went in with more green the same way to adjust the color back toward a shade of teal.
As you add more food coloring, the icing might get a little grainy-looking, so watch out for that. At some point you should let it sit to give the color time to incorporate itself into the buttercream, or just stop adding more.
For this batch I was going for the color on the left called “Turquish,” and by the time that I got it fairly close the icing was looking kind of grainy, so I stopped. This will get darker as it sits, so it should be fine. I thought about adding black to it but them I decided that would be a big mistake because black has a lot of red in it, and that will throw the color completely off. It’s better to let it sit and darken 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.
