Watercolour Cake Tutorial – What to use to make edible paint

Once you’ve made a cake it can be the perfect blank canvas, but sometimes it’s hard to know how to decorate it. If you’re looking for a fun effect to add onto your cakes, what about making it look like it’s been painted with watercolour.

In this weeks video tutorial I’m going to be showing you the perfect way to create edible watercolour paint and a fun and abstract way to add it onto your cakes.

Click below to watch how to create this abstract watercolour effect ⇩

The Watercolour – How to make edible paint

When creating this watercolour effect I tried different methods for creating the watercolour and show 3 of these in the tutorial. The first was using dipping solution or rejuvenator spirit combined with food gels. This by far gave the best result. It created a smooth watery paint, that dried really quickly without any brush marks. It also had a distinction between the shades.

The lighter the food gel or the more dipping solution you add the lighter the colour on the cake. You do want to make sure that you fully dissolve the gel colour in the dipping solution, else if there are any small flecks of gel colour these will take a long time to fully dry.

I also tried mixing the gel colour with alcohol (vodka) and water. Both of these gave very similar effects. You could see all the brush marks in the paint and there wasn’t as much definition between the different shades. They also took so much longer to dry.

When using dipping solution, because of the high alcohol content, as you apply the paint onto the cake the alcohol evaporates and the paint dries within minutes. When using the Vodka, this took around 2 hours to dry and with the water this took over 24 hours to be dry to the touch.

If you are wanting to add the watercolour effect to your cakes, I would really suggest you use the dipping solution. It gave such a great finish and really looked like watercolour.

Adding the Watercolour Effect

For this cake I created a 2 tier cake using dummy cakes. The cake on the bottom was a 7 inch cake, with a 5 inch cake at the top. I applied the watercolour effect starting with pink at the bottom, going into purple and then used the jade and blue by Colour Splash at the top of the cake.

I love that all the colours blended into each other. I would say if you wait a few minutes between shades, just to allow the lighter colours to dry slightly you get all the different shades visible on the side of the cake. I created quite an abstract design just in one pannel, but you could also go over the entire cake or use the same edible watercolour to paint delicate images onto the side, just as you would if you were using real watercolours.

I really hope you enjoy the tutorial and will find it useful if you want to paint your own watercolour effects onto your cake. Plus don’t forget you can make the paint in any colour to match your theme.

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Tools I used

I have put a list below showing all the tools that I used throughout this video or if you would like to see all my favourite cake decorating tools just click here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/cakesbylynz

Raspberry Colour Splash: https://amzn.to/2XSvYF2
Violet Colour Splash: https://amzn.to/3HNNUUo
Jade Colour Splash: https://tidd.ly/3AbxroK
Blue Colour Splash: https://amzn.to/3srK0tK
White Edible art paint: https://bit.ly/3JpvFFj (use LYNZ15 for 15% off)
Dipping Solution: https://amzn.to/3GIggxW

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Plus why not save this tutorial for later and pin it to Pinterest