I recently made cakes for my three son's combined birthday party. My 4yr old wanted Davy Jones' heart with a knife sticking out. (My two youngest are HUGE Pirates of the Caribbean fans!) The shaping was okay. I was getting tired and it was getting late...so it was good enough for a 4yr old. I'll try to post a picture tomorrow. My question is about the icing. I used an IMBC which turned out great and tasted delicious, but I couldn't get it red. I kept adding more and more coloring and it just stayed pinkish red. I had the same problem once before getting icing black. With the black icing I eventually added enough coloring to get it mostly black, but it tasted terrible! How do you get dark colors without it tasting disgusting?

Thanks,
Liza

I use no taste red and a little tulip red. It takes a lot of red to get red though. Depending on the shade of red I will add a little chocolate too. I also don't use the gels it seems to break down the frosting. For black I start with chocolate, you have to make sure no one minds you are using chocolate. You could use brown also to start before you add the black.

What type of coloring were you using? If its just the regular old water based stuff, thats as good as you are going to get just mixing it in.... if you look closely you will see that it is not emulsified. Which also means that as you eat it, your mouth is going to get a LOT darker than you'd expect by the look since theres a million little bits of just color in there. I buy oil based candy coloring to color my icing (SMBC, same issue as IMBC) but I have also figured out that you can melt the regular coloring into a little bit of icing then add that to your large bowl... cause apparently the world would stop if they made brown or ivory candy coloring for me!

I have been using Chefmaster and Wilton gel based colorings that come in little jars.

Liza