How do you get the icing to be black. Everytime I add black food coloring to the icing it turns a grayish color. I need to decorate a cow, so I need it to be real black. Should I start with white or brown icing. Any help would be greatly appreciated it. Thanks a million.

I have a few suggestions for you. I'm not sure how much time you have before you have to do the cake but Americolors are wonderful for getting a true color to your icing without having to use alot. You can buy them on here.

If you don't have alot of time, you could always use the Hershey's dark dutch process cocoa & add it to your icing...it gets it really dark almost black in color depending on how much you use.

If you don't want it to taste like chocolate & don't have enough time to get the Americolor try coloring very small amounts of icing at a time & letting the icing sit overnight to let the color deepen.

You should definitely start with chocolate or brown icing - that way you won't have to use as much black. Also, it darkens over time, so I always make mine a few days in advance. Good luck!

You could start with a chocolate icing, but the really top trick is: let stand your icing for a few hours before decorating with it. The colors tend to darken when it sits. I try to have the darker gray color I can with my gel color and then I wait. Usually turns really black. You can take a look at my pictures, I made some FBCT (Dora, Tweety & Sylvester) You can see how my black turned out.

Hth

Lorris

I discovered a trick completely by accident... I was making a fire truck cake and of course needed black for the tires etc, and was really discouraged about it because it had always turned out a purply gray color on previous attempts. So anyway I made the black frosting and then had to run an errand or something so I stuck it in the fridge. I decided to just frost the tires the next day so when i pulled the frosting out it was too hard to spread and I didn't hav e alot of time so I stuck it in the microwave for 30 seconds, I meant to stop it after just a few but it went the whole time... when it came out it was too runny to spread but was deep dark black...I popped it in the fridge for a minute and then it was perfect. If you have time to mess around with it you can try it with small amounts... I also got a perfect deep black with my fondant for a checkered flag cake by letting it sit for a while and then heating it up a bit.

Pootchi, what tip do you use to do your FBCT? I am anxious to try this method.

Thanks,
darkchocolate

If I don't need a large amount of something like black or red I buy the tubes of premade wilton icing. Considering the amount of paste you have to add it can be cheaper to buy the premade.

One more tip - anytime I have "leftover" icing - just a tiny bit of a color. I save it in a bowl with all the other "leftover" colors. When there is enough in there - I mix it altogether and some black color - tada!! Got black then.