I have to make a red velvet cake this weekend that will be iced in white buttercream. My mother did this for a cake she made last year and the red food coloring that red velvet cakes are saturated in, bled through her buttercream icing. Any suggestions for keeping this from happening. Customer wants buttercream instead of fondant or I would just try that. Thanks.

That's just wrong....there is no way a properly baked and constructed cake should do that. So, assuming you have a decent recipe, and know how to construct a cake, you should be just fine!

I make red velvet all the time, with white icing, not always cream cheese, and I make sure to put it a little thicker so the dark color of the cake doesn't show thru. But this has nothing to do with cake oozing or seeping into the icing.

how can that possibly be?! I never heard of a cake bleeding. Filling, yes, but the cake? I agree that a thicker coating may be necessary, but that just doesn't make sense to me.

Sounds like the cake was not crumb coated first. I think if you do that and then ice you will do just fine.

Do you crumb coat and then let the crumb coat air dry (slightly crust)? If you do that, the crumb coat seals the cake, so the final coat of icing technically never touches the actual cake.

I agree with Jamie ..... it sounds to me like the icing is too thin. And that's happened to me .... in the days before I knew about crumb coating, the icing seemed to soak into the cake, ergo the icing "became thin" and you could see the cake thru the icing. It's not that the cake bled thru ... there wasn't enough icing to cover it.

The 4th of July cake in my pics is a red velvet and no sign of it at all. that buttercream is snow white with the exceptions of the colored decorations. No bleeding there. And I don't crumb coat just one nice thick coat of icing.

AYes that has happened to me too. My cake are put together quite well and my recipe gets rave reviews, but the red wants to bleed through buttercream.