how on earth do you colour butter icing/frosting boldly...

[StateofConfusion]

...Without it looking grainy and odd and tasting shite?

I've taken to sticking to pale hues or the colour it naturally is.

My recipe is 500g icing sugar 250g butter 4tblspn milk 2tspns vanilla extract. If that's relevant.

I'm making cakes for the jubilee and I'm sticking to plain natural coloured butter cream again with union flag cases and flags on top but I really fancied bright red and blue too.

beat the butter until very pale and soft before adding the icing sugar gradually, only using warmed milk if the icing is too stiff - then use colouring paste instead of the liquid

hth

Use gel colouring instead of the liquidy stuff. I use these

In general colour paste is more effective than the liquid colouring. Dunno about for butter icing tho.

im with scootergrrlgels are great

Use gel colours or pastes, like sugarflair, the red on the cake in my profile is their Christmas red, I only used a drop.

If you need them this weekend asda and morrisons gels are meant to be very good.

the bottles of couloring are useless -you need the paste ones and beat the buttercream for a long time to make it pale before adding the colour

I made a green dragon cake yesterday and used satin icing. Instructions (torn out of a magazine by my mum in the mid-seventies were to heat white fat (i used sunflower pure but they recommended trex or similar) and lemon juice until liquid, remove from heat, beat in half quantity of icing sugar. Boil for 2 mins so its bubbling gently all over, beat in other half of icing sugar, 1tbs hot water and food colouring and pour over cake. If you do this on a cooling tray over a baking sheet you can scrape the excess off the sheet, reheat if necessary and repour.

It worked a treat when I got the volume of sugar right (!) and the colour was fab.

I'm currently feeding DS but can look up quantities when I go back downstairs.

Thank you for all the tips, I stuck with boring for these cakes --as I'm a whimp-- but I will be experimenting this week as next month ds has requested red and black cupcakes.

I'm very new to all this cake making, but I beat my buttercream so it looks almost white so I'd colour at the very end with gel/paste.