Hi everyone,

Just wondering if anyone has had luck with mixing food coloring to get black - I'm trying to make some black cupcakes (with orange icing) and have only been achieving a kind of sludgy grey.
Is there any hope or should I give up and make green cupcakes instead?

Thanks for any advice the lovely people here can give me!

oh, no, don't worry, I've had TONS of experiences with dying foods, especially cakes and cupcakes, and it just really takes SO MUCH BLACK! That and Red takes a lot.


Don't give up. Sometimes, if you get the gel dye, the black an actually affect the taste a bit, but not enough to make it un-nummy :D

You just gotta keep adding and adding! If you need to, you can add a few different colors {blue and orange, red and green, purple and yellow, etc. etc. It gets it to turn black easier and the black has depth instead of a greyish/blueish color. :D]

Why don't you just buy black food colouring?

I made cakes with my brother the other day and he chose to use black food colouring to colour them.
(Me: "Put A COUPLE of drops in Alan, then stir it and you can add more if you need it."
Brother: *pours half the bottle of food colouring in*
Me: *facepalm*)

They turned out fine and were black the whole way through, but the crumbs left in the cupcake cases looked green for some reason. Other than that the cakes were nice, and edible which is surprising for something my brother has made :P

rather late on this but they do make a powdered food coloring. much more intense than the paste form or gel food coloring (i prefer the powder then the paste if i can't get the powder)

the powdered is made for candy making, and coloring white chocolate, remember liquid into melted chocolate makes a lump of a mess. so they came up with the powdered. more expensive, but worth the funds if you are going to be doing any amount of tinting foods, iciing, candies.

I'm super late on this topic, but I have this cake icing dye that is the cats whiskers! It dyes stuff super easy and doesn't take alot. Did you end up figuring it out Patricia?

Actually, I gave up as my local doesn't stock black food colouring - made bright orange and green cupcakes with scary faces, so it went well anyways! (It was for a Halloween party). Thanks for the suggestions though! They'll be helpful for next time I give it a go :-)

When using black food coloring it also helps if you start with chocolate frosting instead of white (this will ensure you get black instead of gray).

i forgot about that. and if you are making it from scratch, use semi sweet or bittersweet chocolate.

where do you get the food coloring from? i went to wal mart and albersons and maceys n they didnt have any i looked in the cake icing section are they somewere else?