I am doing an anniversary cake this weekend. I normally don't do this type of work - I try to limit my work to gourmet style special occasion cakes.
Last night I colored enough buttercream a light violet color to pre-make some roses and stored the remainder in an airtight container for use on Saturday.
I put the roses in a "cake-taker" style plastic protector. I just looked at them - they are no longer violet, they're light blue!
What happened? What should I do?
The customer did not order violet......they did not care about color at all - so I'm not locked into violet.

PLEASE HELP -
Lori

BTW -

I used Wilton color.....and because I didn't want to mess around with proper consistency for the roses, I used Wilton premade buttercream.

I will make my own version of buttercream for the majority of the icing come Saturday.

Lori

Purple colors fade very quickly, especially if exposed to light.

I'm guessing the cake-taker was clear? I don't think there's much you can do at this point to fix the color. Unfortunately they faded from the light. Anything with red coloring (red, pink, purple, fuschia...) will fade. I've had this happen with both Wilton and Americolor.

The way I see it, I have 2 options -

1) Should I make new roses with the violet buttercreamI've had in the fridge and put the new roses in an airtight/lighttight container?
If I do this, will me customer pick up a cake with violet roses in the morning, but be displaying a cake with light blue decorations that night?

OR...
2) Should I put the violet buttercream in the fridge out into the cold sunroom with the roses and hope it fades to match? Then do the cake in the light blue - which isn't so bad since it is a silver anniversary....

HOW do you guys handle wedding cakes with specific color requirements? I'm so befuddled by this..... I can't imagine a wedding cake covered with red or pink or violet decorations fading.....
YIKES!

Thanks in advance,
Lori

When I saw the subject line, I knew the issue would be red food coloring.

It's not "purple" that fades. It's the red that fades. Purple is red+blue. when they took #2 Red Food Dye off of the market (1975-ish), the issue of a non-stable red coloring has been the bane (bain?) of a decorator's existence.

The red is not stable when exposed to sun or bright light. When the red fades, all you have left is the blue. The air has nothing to do with it. It's the light. So "airtight" or refrigerator helps retain the color only because it's in a dark spot, not because it's "airtight".