One of the most satisfying parts of cake decorating for me is piping beautiful buttercream swirls. There’s just something so satisfying about finishing a batch of cupcakes, especially when they’re topped with a pastel rainbow buttercream swirl!
In this week’s tutorial, I’ll show you how to pipe the perfect buttercream swirl and, for those of you new to piping cupcakes, I’ll also reveal an easy technique for getting multiple colours into your piping bag to create these gorgeous rainbow effects. Plus, I’ll be sharing some of my top tips for achieving the perfect buttercream colours too.
Watch the full step-by-step video tutorial below to see exactly how it’s done.
Colouring Pastel Buttercream
There is nothing prettier than a pastel buttercream cake or cupcake, and you might be wondering if you need to buy specific pastel shade food gels. The answer is no. You can use any colours, even it they look really bright. You just need to add very small amounts of colour and build it up to the shade you want. Remember less is more. It’s always easier to make buttercream darker than to try and lighten it.
Also remember that buttercream will also develop over time, so the longer you leave it the brighter those colours will get. Here I’m using my American Buttercream recipe which is so delicious and colours so well.
Why does your blue buttercream look green?
A common problem with blue buttercream especially is as you try and mix the colour you end up with this minty green colour. The reason for this is that buttercream has a base colour of yellow and if you add yellow to blue you get green. If you want to use real butter, which always tastes a lot better than vegetable fat alternatives, there is no getting around this, butter is always going to be yellow.
You can mix your buttercream for longer to lighten the butter or add whiteners to reduce the yellowness. Check out my tutorial here for white buttercream. But there is a simplier solution to give you a perfect shade of blue and that is to add purple.
Now bare with me, I know it seems crazy to add purple, but purple is the opposite of yellow. By adding a very tiny amount of purple you neutralise those yellow tones. You can add the purple before or after the blue, but as if by magic as you mix that through the green fades revealing a beautiful shade of blue. This also works with other colours too, if you think they look a little on the yellow side.
Rainbow Buttercream – The cling film technique
If you want to create rainbow buttercream you might be wondering how you can get all those colours evenly into your piping bag without creating a huge mess. The answer is a piece of cling film or plastic wrap.
If I’m ever piping more than 2 colours I will always use this method as it makes it so easy to get all the colours, in this case 6 colours into the piping bag.
Step 1: Layout your cling film and spoon or pipe your buttercream in to thin lines. One thing to always bare in mind is that we will be rolling the cling film up and placing this into our piping bag, so be aware of how large your piping bag is in relation to how long and thick your buttercream lines are.
Step 2: Next fold over the edge of your cling film so that the first colour meets the last and push this down to create a thick sausage shape. Twisting those ends once its rolled.
Step 3: You can now trim off one end of that buttercream sausage and place this into your piping bag. It might not fit right to the end, but shake it down as far as it will go.
As you place some pressure on the end of your piping bag your buttercream will come out of the cling film and fill to the end, with this even spread of buttercream.
Step 4: You can now use this to pipe pretty buttercream swirls or use it to pipe a pretty boarder on the top of your cakes too.
For me I use 12 inch piping bags, and this pipes around 6 cupcakes. If you want to be able to pipe more at a time you can get larger piping bags or to pipe more cupcakes, just remove the cling film and grab another piece, lay out more those buttercream lines, wrap it up and slot this back into your piping bag to continue.
I really hope you enjoy the tutorial and you will find it useful if you want to pipe rainbow cupcakes. If you haven’t already don’t forget you can subscribe to my YouTube channel for more Free cake decorating video tutorials.
Tools I used
Piping Bags
2D piping nozzle
1B Piping Tip
Orange ColourMill (10% off ‘LYNZ10’)
Rose ColourMill (10% off ‘LYNZ10’)
Baby Blue ColourMill (10% off ‘LYNZ10’)
Lime Green ColourMill (10% off ‘LYNZ10’)
Purple ColourMill (10% off ‘LYNZ10’)
Happy Sprinkles – Birthday Bash (10% off ‘LYNZ10’)
Yellow Food Gel (10% off ‘CakesbyLynz’)
Blue Neonz Food Gel
Plus if you’d like to see all my favourite cake decorating tools just click here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/cakesbylynz
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