Black buttercream tips and tricks..

Start with a chocolate buttercream (dark brown) this will use less food colouring to get to your desired black colour which can sometimes taste bitter to some people.

It’s much easier to go from brown buttercream to black than it is to go from white to black. By adding cocoa powder into the mix, you save yourself a lot of food colour gel. You can use half black cocoa powder and half regular cocoa powder for a milder chocolate taste. You can substitute the regular cocoa powder in the recipe with all black cocoa to use even less food colour gel, but the taste will be more like a dark chocolate as opposed to a milk chocolate buttercream. 

Black cocoa powder - It’s cocoa powder that has been heavily Dutched, aka alkalized. It helps provide a rich black colour, so swap your regular cocoa powder. It can have a very strong dark chocolate taste so you can swap out half of the black cocoa powder with your regular cocoa.

Gel Colour - make sure you use black gel colour. Gel colours are more concentrated than liquid food colours. It’s also formulated in such a way that it won’t affect the flavour or consistency of your buttercream.

Give it 24 hours to deepen in colour. It is worth making ahead of time.

To hurry things along you can use an immersion blender (stick blender). An immersion blender knocks out most of the air out of the buttercream making the colour more vibrant but also denser and glossier.