Does anyone have suggestions for making sure the scrollwork I'm doing on a wedding cake (in burgundy) doesn't bleed into the white buttercream the cakes are iced with?

Thanks for any suggestions.

I've heard that adding meringue powder to your icing prevents colors from bleeding but I haven't personally done it, but I'll give you a bump!

Probably the best suggestion I can give you is to tell you to make sure you make the burgundy bc as soon as possible. Make it much, much lighter than you need it and then look at it the next day. Then if needed, you can darker it a little more, but usually you find you don't need to. Doing this cuts WAY down on the amount of color you need, which reduces the chance of bleeding.

Another thing is to wait until the bc on the cake itself is good and crusted over before piping. This helps a lot because the bc on the cake once crusted is drier and less likely to absorb (which causes the bleeding) anything piped on it.

I do a lot of dark piping on white wedding cakes. In the last month I've piped navy on white, black on white, and yes, burgundy on white - no bleeding.

Good luck, and let us know how it turns out!

Omgosh! I just realized that was my 1000th post!
Toot, toot! (sorry, I had to.)

I did a cake with red scroll work on buttercream(in my photos). I iced the cakes the night before and did all the scrollwork the morning of the wedding and had no problems with it bleeding. I used Sugarshack's buttercream recipe and I did not add anything to it.

HTH.

Jo-Ann

I agree with Audrey and Jo-Ann's suggestions. I did black scrollwork this past weekend and no bleeding. My base icing is always crusted .... I do the scrolls the morning of the wedding. So what I'm doing is putting "wet" scroll-icing on top of "dry" crusted icing. When you put wet on wet, you increase the odds of bleeding (simple science). My icing tends to start crusting within 5-10 minutes anyway, so there's not much "wet" to start to bleed out.

another way around it may be to do the scrolls in royal icing if that's an option?

You can only do royal on fondant, not buttercream. The fat content of the buttercream, whether butter or shortening (or both) will 'melt' the royal.