I am planning on doing some cookie bouquets for Valentine's Day...so I was looking around kitchengifts.com and reading through their FAQ's - just to learn whatever helpful tips I could. I came across these two things that I thought ya'll would be interested in reading: (copied & pasted from their website)

NEED BROWN OR BLACK ICING? For brown icing melt
unsweetened chocolate and mix it into your white icing. It's not only brown,
it tastes great too! For black icing, just add black gel coloring to your brown icing.
You'll use less black coloring and the icing will taste like chocolate! (KCI carries
black gel coloring CLICK HERE )

THE SECRET TO DARK RED ICING Making dark red
icing can be a challenge unless you know the secret. Make your icing a day
ahead of time. That dark pink icing will darken over time and turn into the
red you need if you give it 24 hours. I like to make my red icing using maraschino
cherry juice as my liquid. This turns my icing a nice pink then I don't need as much
red food coloring. Add some almond flavoring and your icing will taste WONDERFUL!


I'm sure there's some of you here who already knew of these methods, but I thought there were probably lots of us who could benefit from them. For me, with the brown/black icing tip, it was a "duh" moment.... Why didn't I think of that before???!! lol

Thanks for the tips - always good to know.

Thank you for the info, I did not know that!!!!

Thanks JennT,
I did not know either.

Nitu

Thanks for the info.

Great tips!!

Here's another one...if you do end up using a lot of RED gel paste and get a bitter aftertaste just add a dash or two of powder cinnamon....it takes away that nasty taste and leaves a hint a cinnamon!!

These tips are great! I'm so glad you posted them. It has always been my pet peeve to watch someone color red & black icing and not wait for it to darken first. You don't need as much color as you think you do.

Great tips! And since we've all been busy making Dale's little Christmas mice, we all have marachino cherry juice left overs! LOL