I've made royal icing flowers for many years, but not recently, and they've never done this before. Tuesday I got a request from a friend to make a small cake for her parents' 40th anniversary and I had some white royal icing left from a cake over the weekend so I got the brilliant idea to make roses for her cake from it. I colored it a beautiful, bright red using a little Wilton red-red and a lot of Super Red. Made some hearts and roses and a few fours and zeros. The numbers, I put in my counter top oven, just because it was somewhere I knew they wouldn't be disturbed and I'd see them through the window before turning the thing on, which I did one time when I had a buttercream sheetcake in my real oven without putting the don't turn on the oven sign on top of it because I just knew I wouldn't forget it was in there, lol. I left the flowers and hearts on top of the little oven on parchment squares which are on a cookie sheet.

Last night I went to check to see if they were all the way dry and the flowers and hearts had turned brownish, especially on the edges of the petals. The numbers made with the same icing, just stored inside the oven, are still bright red. This has never happened to me before and I don't know why it did this time. I guess it could be the humidity because I have opened the windows a few times this week, but at my old house I made tons of flowers in my basement workshop, which was probably a lot more humid than my present kitchen and it never happened there, even to bright reds. And more importantly, is there a way to fix them? Petal dust? Red coloring sprayed with the air gun? Red coloring with luster dust in it? Any ideas what I can do to save these flowers without having to make new ones?

I couldn't wait for suggestions, I mixed some sparkle dust with red air brush color and painted it on with a paintbrush. I figured that even if it didn't look great, they couldn't look worse.  Wow, did it work! My fingers are pink, but the flowers are beautiful. They are red and shiny now and I'm happy again.

oh good -- I didn't have a clue -- wow what a mystery though -- great save

It was a great save for a while, but now they look even darker than they did earlier. They are a pretty color, just not the red I wanted them to be. I still don't understand what happened. The leftover icing is still in the piping bag and it's a beautiful red, just like it was when I made it. It's been a long time since I've made flowers of any kind with royal icing, but I made my sister's wedding cake 20 years ago and it had red royal icing roses all over it, big ones, tiny ones, all sizes of them and they never changed color. I'm pretty sure her wedding was in the summer, too.  Oh, well, it's no big loss, it's just puzzling. The cake is for Sunday so I guess I'll just make buttercream flowers tomorrow when I do the cake and hope they don't turn weird colors overnight.

that is the strangest thing ever -- one set of items stays red the other darkens -- so the thicker items darken right -- an idea would be to write to the food color peeps even if it's two different companies and see what they say -- or call them even --

and maybe stick with just using one of the red colors on the buttercream -- and make your red icing two days in advance -- you don't wanna go through this last minute -- ok so that was several ideas I can't count :)

use some milk in your buttercream -- american BC right? it helps hold color better -- lemme know how it goes and I hope it all goes great!