How to Make Red and Black Royal Icing Easily!

[Music] hi everyone this is stephanie from little cookie cult if you struggle with getting deep and dark colors especially red and black this video is for you i'll walk you through step by step on my process of how i get dark and deep strong colors for today's example i'll be using americolor super black americolor red red which is my preferred red and i'll be using americolor electric pink okay so the first color we're going to do is red i'm going to show you a couple different ways to make it and show you that the results are very similar here i've got about a cup of icing my royal icing that i always use now if you've seen my tutorial before you know that i put white color in my icing so you can achieve these dark red colors even with putting white in your icing now just a side note for people that don't know yet the white in the icing prevents color bleed and especially when you're working with colors like red or black it helps a lot for those colors not to bleed into lighter colors when they're next to each other on the cookie so the first red i'm going to make is with my americolor red red and here i've put a little bit of gel color in there and i'm going to mix it in now this is a decent amount of icing i have here so it will take a decent amount of gel color if you have a lot less icing you'll see that you won't need as much color obviously and if you have a lot more icing than this it's going to take a lot more gel color so keep in mind the stronger colors you do need to use a good amount of color to get there so just be patient and i'll show you the steps to make it a little bit easier so here i just put a few drops and i'm mixing it up and you can see it's a very light pink so once i've got it mixed in nice and well i can see how much it's changed and i can see that it's really really light and this is really far from what i want i'm going to be adding a few more drops a little bit more than a few actually because if you notice the color is really light then you want to add a lot more if your color you know if it's less icing and you've added quite a bit already then you probably don't want to add too much more so i always do it in several steps and mix really well just to see how dark my icing is getting or how you know is it still a shade of pink or is it leaning to more towards a red so once we have it all stirred up we'll take another look here and see if we need to add any more [Music] okay so now that it's well stirred i can see it's still not where i want it to be it still has a pink tone to it so i want to add a little bit more gel to it i'm going to start up really well you want to always make sure that all the gel is mixed in so you see the true tone if you do over saturate your colors it will become extremely dark a lot of times when the icing dries on the cookie it actually dries a little bit darker than what you have in the bag especially like a red i've done when i first started i'd be mixing my red and making it so red and so saturated and then it would dry it would dry so deep and dark and i really didn't like it so here we just take it step by step i can see it's a lot more red than pink now it just looks very pale so i know i'm getting there what i'm going to do is cover it with a damp paper towel reason being is we're going to set this aside for an hour or two and the paper towel just make sure that it stays damp if your house is really warm or it's hot outside you know just sprinkle a little bit of water on top and this will prevent the icing from crusting over we're going to set it aside so the color develops a little bit and we'll come back to it later [Music] okay so i'll show you another way to make red as well i've got a different looking bowl here so we can tell the difference and i'm going to start with my americolor electric pink now you can really start with any pink this is one of my favorite pinks to use so i thought i would start with this one so i'm going to start with a few drops and i want to make this icing nice and pink so if you have leftover pink icing or you don't have a lot of red on hand and you're scared you can't get a nice strong bright red this is a good way to go as well now that my icing is nice and pink and i've got it mixed up then i can go ahead and add my americolor red red to this [Music] you can already see that with that squeeze of gel this is a little bit less icing than the first the first red we made but with a squeeze about the same that we use for each step it's already taking on a lot more of a red tone than what we had earlier so this one became red a lot quicker than the first one because we started with a pink base so i'll cover this one as well with a wet paper towel we're gonna set it aside the longer the better so the more time you have it's great but an hour or two helps a lot more as well [Music] all right moving on to another color people hate making more than red icing we're going to be making black so i have a new bowl of icing here and i'm going to add my americolor super black at first it looks like it's going well like it's going to be nice and dark but as i'm stirring more and more you'll see it becomes more of a dark gray than a true black so we're going to do the same process here we want to get to a nice dark gray and then we're going to put it aside with a damp paper towel and let it sit for a little while this still won't get us the black that we want but it'll get us a lot closer to where we want to be just a note if you're going to be coloring dark colors like this it's always best to color them before you thin them down to be your flood icing adding so much gel color will thin your icing down so you always want to do it first before adding water okay back to our first red you can see it's a little bit more saturated than when we left it but it's still not quite red enough so i'm gonna go ahead and add some more gel color to it now i said this before this is quite a bit of icing so i'm using quite a bit of gel if you're making it you know half this amount you have to think that you need half the gel color always do less than more because you know otherwise you're going to be adding more white icing to it to make it better if you over saturate it so you know in the beginning if you're really new take it slow do a few drops at a time and you know once you realize how much color you need to change your you know deep in the colors how much if it affects your icing you can go ahead and add some more and you know you'll probably be more accurate so here i'm pretty happy with where my icing is it looks like a nice red it'll continue to saturate itself as it sits in the piping bag ready to get onto my cookies so you don't want to go too far at this point you want to stop and not go any further if you over saturate your color it'll just continue to deepen and sometimes dry way darker than you want it to be okay so now on to our second red icing so this is the one with the pink base again it's deepened a little bit we didn't use as much red color as the first one and so we're gonna add a little bit more here i'm gonna mix it in and see i still detect you know a little bit of a pink tone to it and not quite red so i am gonna add a little bit more gel color here and again there's no rule of thumb like you know you need this many drops for this much icing you'll always be making different amounts of icing so it's more by what you see i'm always looking for a shade or two lighter than what i actually want the icing always deepen in the bag so you don't want to go too crazy with the color in the beginning this is looking pretty good here so i'm going to set this aside and we'll move on to our black icing well it's not quite black it's gray but we'll get it there so i didn't use too much in the beginning you know we only colored it once let it sit but it did develop a little bit darker so here i'm going to add a little bit more black and again this is a decent amount of icing you know it's probably at least a cup of icing here i've got so it will take a good amount of black now one thing to note is when you are coloring your colors like this you know these dark colors you are using quite a bit of gel color it will change the consistency of your icing normally you only put a few drops to achieve the color you want or you know a little bit more than that but we're doing you know good squeezes of icing maybe three or four times so that's just like adding water to your icing you know you're adding liquid to your icing so you are changing the consistency i started with pretty stiff icing and here it's still stiff but it's it's not like it was when we started so keep that in mind you always want to color your icing first before you thin it down for your flood otherwise you you may have you know really really thin icing by the end of it so you can see i've added black a few times here and let's say if i needed this black right away so you know i'm adding it right now i could have stopped after the second edition and let it sit here but i want to show you guys you know if you're a little bit in a rush that you can still achieve it all right this looks pretty good it's a really dark gray by the time i get this in my piping bag and i get all my cookies ready to be iced and it dries on the cookie it'll be a dark black so this is the point where i want to stop and not go any further we don't want to go crazy like i said with the color so at this point you're good to go it's almost there this is the point you want to stop at now let's say you're in a rush and you're not sure if your color is going to dry dark enough i'll show you a little tip here so i've got my first red icing and i'm just going to smother some onto the cookie here and i'm going to take a little bit of my second icing as well my second red this is the one with the pink base and just swipe some on here this is thick icing and i'm just doing a thin coat here so it dries quickly and then i'll take my black as well and i'll just rub it on here so you know how i said that the colors dry a little bit darker when they're on the cookie this is a good way to see once your colors are dry what it'll actually look like so if you're worried that your color is not deep enough at that point you can always do this on a test cookie and see what color your icing will dry and another tip is if you ever have leftover black or red icing make sure to freeze it once you have another order or another set of cookies you need to do with those colors pull them out of the freezer defrost them add some new icing to it add a little bit more color and there you go you have your icing ready to go and you won't have to go through all these steps to get those dark deep colors as always thank you so much for watching looking forward to seeing you in the next tutorial and happy baking [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Little Cookie Co

Views: 23,977

Rating: 4.9230771 out of 5

Keywords: red icing, black icing, how to colour icing, royal icing, red royal icing, black royal icing, cookie decorating

Id: NXQyjwMDFfU

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021