How to create a perfect colour palette for Cake Design

When it comes to choosing the right food colorants, Roxy & Rich collections are the way to go because they offer high-quality products in a wide range of colours. They have so many options it might even seem a bit overwhelming for some but is so essential when it comes to cake decorators such as me.

For realistic cakes such as food cakes, choosing the right colour is so important. Mixing FONDUST® powders or Hybrid Petal Dust is crucial for achieving realism. Nothing screams more fake than a fire truck red tomato on a burger cake, am I right?

Although Roxy & Rich has many colour options, in all their collections combined, when it comes to sugar flowers or realistic cakes: hues, depth, and tints are crucial. That’s why I love creating my own colours with their products.

How to mix food colorants?

You can mix any colours together for any of their collections. When it comes to creating your own shade, mix the dust (or cocoa butter) from the same collection together to achieve a custom look.

Here’s a few examples. There is no limit when mixing colours and it’s so much fun!

Add brown to green colours to create a muted tone. Sometimes green petal dust might be too vibrant to achieve a natural look on sugar flowers for instance. Adding a warm brown to green makes the colour looks more realistic.
Choose a yellow Hybrid Petal Dust shade and add a red-tone petal dust to create your own orange colour.
You can add yellow FONDUST® to your green fondant to make it paler and more vibrant.
When you add the opposite colour on the colour wheel, you neutralize the colour. Adding a warm brown (red base) to green (blue/yellow base), both bases neutralize themselves and create a muted colour, which is more common in nature.
Same goes with FONDUST® powders. To create a realistic leaf green, you might need to add a little brown FONDUST® to your green fondant.

Create the perfect colours for your edible projet

By mixing different colours you can create a unique result. Nothing looks more personalized than a custom colour palette.

As I mentioned before, if you need a specific colour, mixing is the way to go. Although Roxy & Rich has so many options when it comes to specific colours, they may not have the perfect hue or tint that you are looking for to achieve your project.

The perfect way to do it is by analyzing the colour wheel and understanding how it works.

The best way to understand it is to test different powders together. The good thing is that you can almost always readjust the colours you create. You can add more sugar paste (or buttercream) if you added too much food colorants.

Always add a little quantity of food colorant at a time so that way you don’t overdo it. Always try the colour created on a test surface before committing to your whole cake.

How to create more intense colours

The next best way to achieve a custom colour is to mix white or black powder with your colours. By adding white powders, you’ll achieve a pastel, by adding black, you’ll create a darker grayish version of that colour. Which is great to add depth and intensity.

You can change the hue of your colour by adding the colours next to it on the colour wheel. For example, by adding pink to purple, you will stay in a purple-ish colour, but it will be more on the pink side for the purple spectrum. It’s a great way to add dimension to sugar flowers.

Now that you know all the possibilities Roxy & Rich food colorants offer you, next time let your creativity flow by mixing their product and having fun creating custom colours.