I need to make a lot of red icing for an Elmo cake, but it always has a terrible taste. Any suggestions on how to fix that since almost all of Elmo is red? Thanks.

There was an old thread about the best way to colour fondant red and i'll put down some suggestions from that, that might transfer to buttercream:

1. use maraschino cherry juice as part of your liquid to give it a slight pink/red colour then add the red colouring

2. Add red jello to the recipe

3. Add strawberry cool-aid powder

maybe for 2 and 3 you can use them as a subsitute in place of a portion of the icing sugar.

Also are you using like a wilton 'no taste red' cose that will help and then if it's not red enough for you, you can add a bit of your normal red too.

Sorry that's all the advice i got HTH

Duplicate post, please also see:

http://cakecentral.com/cake-decorating-ftopict-644196-.html

HTH