The Buttercream Coloring Hack That Will Cut Down On Cleanup

Buttercream adds an extra touch of sweetness and decorative flair to a variety of baked goods. As We Take the Cake notes, buttercream is simpler to make than most types of decorative frosting because you don't have to worry about over-beating it. Not to mention, Food reports that transforming your classic buttercream recipe into icing suited for cake decorating is an easy fix. All you have to do is replace half of the usual butter the dish calls for with shortening.

But once you've made this ingredient swap, you still need to add food coloring to your frosting before you start customizing your cupcakes. After all, you don't want to pipe colorless flowers onto a festive birthday cake or create an all-white Santa sugar cookie. However, this step is also where things tend to get messy. Because if you hope to decorate your cake with more than one color of buttercream frosting, you'll have to use different bowls to make each batch — right? Well, according to Instagram, that's not always the case, because there is a way to mix several different colors of buttercream with just one dish.

Instagram baker G Baby Cakes explained in a video that if you want to use just one bowl to mix a rainbow of buttercream icing colors, all you have to do is blend each color, one after the other, in the right order. So what is the winning combo? The Instagram baker recommends starting with yellow, then orange, red, green, and blue, before finishing off with purple. 

Mixing the colors in this order works because (as you may have already noticed) these are the colors of the rainbow. And as noted by 99designs, every color of the rainbow "bleeds into its neighbors." So by following this color combination, the leftovers from the previous batch of buttercream will mix into your new color without affecting it.

While the Instagram baker uses this trick to create a single serving of rainbow buttercream, it will be just as effective at helping you fill separate frosting bags with different colored icing. Now that you have unlocked this buttercream coloring secret, you'll be able to decorate sugar cookies with bright colors while slicing your post-baking clean-up time in half.