The unexpected secret to vibrant buttercream (without using heaps of food colouring)

It all comes down to one common household appliance.

Georgia Mahood

2 min read

August 12, 2024 - 2:39PM

Vibrant buttercream split screen

For anyone who’s dabbled in cake decorating, you’ll likely understand the challenge of creating a deeper, more vibrant-coloured buttercream.

No matter how much red food colouring you add, you always end up with pink buttercream – and, your many attempts to make pitch-black buttercream always end with the kitchen covered in black food dye and sad, grey buttercream.

Making vibrant, deeper-coloured buttercreams can be a difficult task: adding too much food colouring alters not only the taste of the buttercream but it can also affect the consistency.

As someone whose skin might as well be permanently dyed with food colouring at this point, I’ve experienced a lot of lows when it comes to colouring buttercream – often, I find opting for pastels is just easier.

But when Halloween rolls around and a black cake is a must, or your best friend has asked for a red birthday cake, it’s pretty hard to avoid making these deeper, dark colours. So, here’s my little secret to making more vibrant, deeper-hued buttercreams.

The secret? Microwave your buttercream

It may sound counterintuitive, but melting buttercream in the microwave is the secret to enhancing the colour of it.

Once you’ve stirred in a good couple of drops of gel (never liquid) food colouring to your buttercream, (in our example, you can see the buttercream reaches a dusty rose hue with a few drops of red), pop the buttercream in the microwave at 5-10 second intervals till the buttercream starts to soften. Just be careful not to fully melt the buttercream.

You’ll instantly notice that the buttercream has deepened in colour. Pop it in the freezer for 5-10 minutes to thicken it up again – then it can be piped and spread over cakes and cupcakes.

Say hello to smoother buttercream too

If you’ve ever decorated cakes in a super-cold environment, you may have noticed how hard it is to apply buttercream smoothly on a cake. The butter hardens quickly and you end up with an icing job that resembles a Picasso painting.

So not only does the microwave hack help with colour, but it helps improve the texture too. When buttercream is slightly melted, the air bubbles are removed from the icing, resulting in extra-smooth buttercream that can be applied to a cake in a picture-perfect way (Hello, Insta-worthy cakes IRL).

The cake decorator’s buttercream: Swiss meringue

Cake decorators like myself often choose Swiss meringue buttercream as their ‘ride or die’ buttercream. With its meringue base that has butter added to it, it tastes much nicer than regular buttercream and is smoother – unlike regular buttercream, which can be grainy from the icing sugar.

It has a great consistency for piping and spreading smoothly on cakes. Plus, it’s easy to add flavouring like melted chocolate and jam.

Check out our Swiss meringue buttercream recipe.

More buttercream recipes:

Originally published as The unexpected secret to vibrant buttercream (without using heaps of food colouring)