Hey,

Hope someone out there can help me!

I want to create a candy cane effect with frosting using the painted icing bag technique, but I'm unsure of which red gel to use as I don't want it to taint the taste? It's white chocolate frosting with a red stripe and will hopefully turn out looking like this:

Obviously the red gel will only be coating parts of the icing and not mixed in, but the last thing I want is a slight bitter taste from the colour. I had thought about Wilton Christmas red as it's a nice rich colour but would love any suggestions for what could be better? I'm in the UK so there aren't too many brands available to me, that's why I thought of Wilton first. 

Hope someone can help! :) 

Jonny

An idea for that is to use a stripe of red icing instead of the pure red color.

When I want a thin line like that I pipe the line of (in this case) red up the inside of the bag.

edited to say --so that way you have the icing to 'thin' out the coloring so you won't taste the redness so noticeably.

I wonder if you could try red piping gel and flavour it with a bit of peppermint, then stripe the bag. it would add some shine too.

Sue

Yes a good stripe of red coloured gel in the piping bag will make this effect.  Use a table knife to lay it down in a 3mm deep strip down the length of the bag, it's not painted with a brush.  

You don't need much colour if you are using professional paste. Ask for Wilton red-red or no-taste red.   Add a few drops lemon juice if you are not adding peppermint--there will not be any bitterness from the colour.  I have made darker red royal icing with no bitter taste from the Wilton red paste.

They did this with either a plain round tip or the bag with no tip at all. If you look carefully, you can see that they swirled around 3 times on each cupcake.

I use a method that I saw on here somewhere at some point.  Lay a piece of plastic wrap on the table, and put a bunch of white frosting on it, and then add a stripe of the red on one side of the white.  Roll the plastic wrap into a tube, put it in the piping bag, and pipe away!

Here's a tutorial except you probably only need 1 or 2 stripes in the big for the effect in the photo =).  http://ginadewitt.blogspot.com/2012/12/striped-icing-technique.html

wilton red taste's awful, but they have a non taste red. don't know why if the other taste bad, i use the Chinese red in the plastic bottles,