I made a colorflow decoration for a ckae I need this weekend. My question is, do I have to wait until the buttercream crusts before putting it on the cake? Will the shortening cause the dried decoration to deteriorate?

Thanks!

Yes the grease in the buttercream will break down your Colorflow decoration. Some options, a piece of rice paper or marshmallows, wafer cookies or just the flat icecream wafer if you can get that, the kind you make an icecream sandwich from, sugar cubes. Some people use a piece of dried fondant, about 1/4 inch thick, even though there is shortening in fondant, it is very dry and doesn't break the colorflow down as quickly. Put it on close to serving time, the long it sits on buttercream the more it will be affected.
Hugs Squirrelly

sunlover00- I used color flow decorations on buttercream the other week for my daughter's Kindergarten class. I put the decorations on before I left for the school and the kids ate it pretty quick. I saved a few decorations at home and plopped them on buttercream. The last time I noted was five hours and they were fine. Sometime after that, little hands grabbed them and they were gone! I know the buttercream will affect them but as of five hours, mine were still good.

kos

SquirrellyCakes
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kos

I have placed color flow pieces on cakes for as long as 18 hours with no visible signs of degradations.

I usually make my pieces a week or more in advance and let them dry thoroughly. I suspect the drier the piece is the better is stands up to moisture and grease.

One thing I've noticed is that if you have a strongly colored buttercream under the colorflow pieces the colors will seep through along with the butter. That wasn't a pretty sight!

Thanks! I made my decoration 2 days ago and it is brittle dry. I"m afraid I'll break it! So I think I'll let the buttercream crust really well and put it on right before it gets picked up.

Thanks for the tips!

what is a color flow piece?

Color flow is also known as floodwork, or run sugar.... there must be instructions on here somewhere...others will have a better way to explain it.

If not, there might be something on the Wilton site. There are usually instructions in the Wilton Yearbooks, it is making a character or design using a product that is basically like royal icing. You outline with a thicker consistency of this Colorflow product and then flood in with thinned Colourflow. You let it harden for about 3 days and then use as a decoration.
Hugs Squirrelly

Thanks Squirrelly for mentioning Wilton. I think I refered about 5 folks to the Wilton site today and I don't want to seem like a Wilton fanatic!

Very true!

Thanks, I am familiar with "flooding" - just hadn't heard "color flow"

Well, the cake is over, and I put it on at the last minute. However I put other pieces I'd made on another cake overnight to test them and they held up just fine -even all day after that. So no worries - whew!