If you need to make yellow icing, whether it’s buttercream frosting or royal icing, you’ll need to use yellow food coloring, which seems obvious. It’s not that simple, though, because different food coloring will give you different shades of yellow, and if you want to match a shade, you might need to do some color adjusting with other basic food colors.
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Which food coloring to use.
Start with any yellow food coloring that you have that’s a pretty neutral yellow. You don’t want it to be too green or too red, since that will affect the final color that you get.
Since there are so many shades that people refer to as “yellow” (think lemon, egg, pastel, golden, 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 in this case I would need yellow and red (if not other ones also) to make these shades. I wanted to end up with a golden yellow that you could paint over with gold luster dust paint, so that’s going toward the orange side.
The easiest thing would be to get some food coloring that was already yellow, like these Americolor shades. Choose the one that’s the closest to NOT having tints of other colors in it. I started with Americolor Lemon Yellow, which isn’t very red or green, it’s a pretty pure yellow.
I also used Americolor Red Red and Warm Brown later in the mixing.
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 Red Red: https://collabs.shop/7dzlaz
- Americolor Warm Brown: https://collabs.shop/7dzlaz
Start slowly.
Add a little bit of yellow 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 start adding the red to tint it.
If you need to make the icing brighter, but not change the tint, just drop more food coloring in or add more from the toothpick. If you want to start tinting the yellow so that it’s a little more toward the orange side, add some red food coloring.
Start with a little and add more as you go so that you don’t throw the color balance off too much at once. Red is a VERY strong color and will take you from yellow to orange very quickly if you add too much, so start with a teeny tiny bit of red to see what that looks like.
As you add the red, it will tint the icing to a warmer color. Make sure to stir the red in really well before adding more so that you can make sure to see what color you’re working with.
Check the color as you’re working to see if it’s too orange. This was after mixing the red in, and it was a lot warmer than the original yellow, but wasn’t completely orange yet, so that was fine. This was a nice sunflower-type yellow, so it would work for a lot of flowers.
I decided to get it to an even more orange/golden yellow, so I added a little more red. 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.
I added a little Americolor warm brown to the icing to tone it down a little. Brown has a lot of red in it, so I knew that it would get a little more orange, but it also has a lot of green, so that would darken the icing and neutralize some of the 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.
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 yellow food coloring, click here.
The final color range.
This is the range of yellow colors that I came up with by mixing the yellow with the red and brown. You can see that it’s obviously not going to be as simple as saying “yellow” and matching what your customer (or you) are trying to go for on your cake. Knowing how to adjust the color is important!
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.