Hi!!!
I just made elmo's face and my red changed a lot. It still looked great but that was not the red I wanted. The problem was that I made plenty of red and in my decorating bag I could only put so much, so I covered the rest and put it back in the fridge. When my bag was almost empty I refilled it with the icing I had in the fridge. The cake looked great, but the next day when I went to the party I noticed that the icing that I put at the end was darker that the one I used first even though they were make together. Does this have anything to do with it being in the fridge for that short period.....I thought that you could actually decorate a cake in stages (at least that's what my wilton instructor told us)..... do you have any advice?

I've always found that the more rich colors will darken after setting for a while. Whenever I need red, green, black or dark blue I make the icing and let it sit for a day before actually using it.

Hmmmm...I find it strange that they are both from the same batch and the color was that noticeable.I refridgerate all my colors and then take them out and give them a stir but even if the icing in the bag was from the same batch it should still have darkened at the same rate and color.I'm sure once the whole cake is done and let to sit or refridgerate the colors will look the same!

interesting...i've actually had this happen with plain ol' chocolate buttercream, where i had to smear on some soft icing onto the crusted icing surface to make some chocolate letters stick on the side, and the smears were very visibly darker than the cake. i'm not sure what caused this, but the cake was refrigerated before the extra icing (which was room temperature) was used.

mysterious...

unfortunately, i dont have an answer. the same thing happened to me when i made a scooby doo cake, so it was a real dark brown and you could see he ended up about 3 different shades and it was all the same batch, if any one has a reason why, that would be great. i had to use a ton of brown to get it scooby's color, i wonder if using lots of color has something to do with it?

Hi Thais,
I'm glad you brought this up, I had the same thing happen to my Basinet cake I made, The lighter square in the middle of the blanket was a bag refill from the same bowl of icing, the bowl was on the counter covered and yet the color of the last square I did with the new bag was lighter in color and stayed that way. Lucky for me it was a even square I had left so it looks like it was meant to be that way. Curios to know the reason for this as mine was not in fridge and it went lighter not darker.

I've noticed if I am doing something with alot of the same icing, that the icing in the end of the bag is a bit of a different color. I think it has something to do with the warmth of your hands, where it might be melting or softening it.

wow ...i have to keep an eye out for this... I learned from here a while back to let the iccing color sit and it will get darker with time.....and found that this is true.....now I have another thing to look out for

Maybe it is the warmth of your hand as the icing starts to "melt" or "seperate" in the bag. I wonder if the bowl your storing in is the same you mixed it in. If it is and you didn't really scrap the bowl and mixed really really good originally, then when your refilling your bag, you may be picking up "white" frosting that wasn't really mixed in and therfore, lightening your color. Does that make sense?

Rose

The same happened on my Winnie the Pooh 3D.

The gold in the back would not blend in with the other gold after filling bag...thank goodness it was only a little spot.