Help me make red icing!

[Bakingdisaster]

Reposted here for traffic, because I'm in a hurry.

Hi, I have made my son's birthday cake, and went to ice it with pre bought red fondant, and I cannot use it, as it tastes sour and disgusting, and will ruin the cake.
I don't want to make more buttercream, hoping to avoid this as in abit of a hurry, and ran out of butter now. I was wondering if I made red icing using icing sugar, water and food dye would it stick to a dirty iced cake without running and showing gaps? It needs to not be see through.

It is the food dye that makes it taste sour

If I make vanilla icing made with water and icing sugar and vanilla essence, will it stick to a dirty iced cake?

Water icing will always be patchy I'm afraid, at least on the sides. Could you use the nasty tasting, but recommend removing before eating or is it too big of fancy a party? Ie, I could go that at home, but not at above kids party.

Do you have cream and white chocolate? You could do a whipped ganach, it handles like buttercream and can be coloured, but obvs you'd need red food colouring

Really you'd be better making butter icing and dying that red. Or using white chocolate dyed red? Chocolate ganache dyed red?

At a pinch buy some vanilla Betty Crocker buttercream and stir in some food dye.

Water icing won't stick on top of buttercream I'm afraid. You'll need to make some more buttercream or get some white fondant and dye it yourself.

I would buy a tub or two of Betty Crocker and red food colouring (not the cheapest stuff as it tastes gross) and then follow the instructions to create a glaze which you pour over the cake. Easier than icing it and looks fine as long as you have enough to cover the cake and it's thick enough

And you need an awful lot of food dye to get red rather than pink

I'm a professional baker , you need to make more buttercream.
And use red extra Sugarflair.

Kids will just eat around it if they don't like it. I wouldn't worry about it.

I think you need coloured paste rather than food colouring to stop it tasting bitter (DD1 still remembers her Ariel cake with inedible hair...)

Just use what you've got and remove it from the cut cake. Anything with copious amounts of food colouring will taste foul.

What you want will definitely not work with icing sugar/water or milk type icing. That is always going to be runny and thin and doesn't stick well on the sides of any cake, let alone one previously iced then scraped down.

You need high quality food colour and I'd probably go with colouring a white chocolate ganache for a good colour and strong vanilla flavour.

What is the cake of? Red sweets like strawberry laces?

How about some red royal icing- icing sugar and egg whites - you can make it hard like butter cream and it will set solid.

Agree with PPs you would need a lot of dye to colour your own and it will taste just as bad. A lot of these fancy cakes you see don’t actually taste good

The icing is always gross, just use it anyway. You're worrying too much!

Thanks all! I ended up using blue fondant, and it tasted much nicer. I was able to use the same theme and tweak the design. I had one happy little boy!

I think there was something wrong with the red; it tasted awful. The other colours are always fine. No idea why!

I will try that another time, it is like the Christmas cake icing isn't it.

Haha, i had an Ariel mermaid cake too; omg I wanted to eat it. DM cut the picture off the top (because she said it looked too nice to eat). It was then left proudly displayed, so I could look at it everyday, as dm had worked so hard on it. Inevitably it was thrown out in the end, and I then couldn't eat it because it had "been there too long." 😭😭😭
This is the exact reason that once picture and videos are done, my dcs can enjoy their cake without any auditing!