Hiya everyone, I'm trying to use cocoa butter mixed with colour dusts for hand painting, I'm finding though that the coloured cocoa butter, kept liquid in a glass over a mug of boiling water, hardens very quickly on the brush when moving to work on the cake. I'm using 100% food grade cocoa butter which is rock hard at room temperature, is there anything I can add to it to make it easier to use?

a little van extract may break it down a little and keep it from hardening as fast, im not all that sure though, hope it helps some.

Hi everyone, I spent St Patricks day doing some tests on this and the best result came from adding a tiny amount of flavourless oil- I actually preferred the taste of hazelnut oil but I appreciate this would be a problem for nut allergy sufferers.
Since too much oil makes the hand painting run in a warm room, too little makes it harden on the brush whilst painting, I fiddled with ratios getting a good result with 1 heaped teaspoon grated 100% cocoa butter to 3 drops oil.

This mix hardens up well for storing and I found having small amounts of different colours in an icecube tray works really well, I just keep it in a dish of hot water when using. Mixing metallic dusts in this way was far more effective for me than using dipping solution where I find the powder can easily rub off if its touched after its dried.

This is somewhat cheaper than any of the other pre emulsified products I could find and another bonus is that 100% cocoa butter never goes off!

I hope this is useful to someone else, it means I can use the half-kilo tub of rock-hard cocoa butter I bought now!

Take care all,

Gray