This past weekend I made some baby shower cakes and cupcakes for a friend. There wasn’t a particular theme except the color blue and silver. Now this isn’t the first time I’ve catered for a baby shower, so I had an idea of what I wanted it to look like. If you’re like me and are very particular about your colors, you know how difficult it is to find that riiiiight shade of sprinkles. Try googling “baby blue sprinkles” and most likely you’ll get the generic blue. The first time someone requested a baby blue cake, I searched high and low for the right shade. Etsy, amazon, and just plain google search turned up nothing. Zip. Zilch.
You know what they say, “If you want something done, do it yourself.” (<= Side Note: Fifth Element is one of my favorite movies. Also, Gary Oldman pretty much can be anyone he wants. How is this the same person that played Commissioner Gordon?) And so I did. All you need is a ziplock bag, white sprinkles, and gel food color.
Place your sprinkles in a ziplock bag, add in your gel color. A tiny dab will do. You can always add more but you can’t take away the color. Start massaging your sprinkles into the gel color. The sprinkles will magically start taking on the color of your dye without melting. Once all the sprinkles are uniform in color, you are ready to go!
For the sprinkles on the cake I used, Americolor’s sky blue and electric blue and for the cupcakes, I used Wilton’s cornflower blue. I bought the silver sprinkles because metallic colors just don’t work as well when hand dying them.
Another tip I have is that if you’re short on time and on a budget, I recommend ordering items from Etsy. I love Etsy for their homemade things and supporting small business is always a good idea. I suppose I could’ve made the little converse booties and the cutout sign, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have done as neat of a job and it would’ve taken me forever. What I did make were the little fondant pom poms to tie the whole thing together with the décor. I promise to do a tutorial on this soon! 🙂
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