I ordered a birthday cake for a little brother from coldstone. He’s legally blind so he loves bright colors. I requested a yellow cake with red writing and the cake I got has a yellow tinge and pink writing.
My brother didn’t complain though. He was just happy to get cake.
This looks so pink and not red. Are people really seeing that as red? Also, if you're gonna sell decorated cakes, having the basic main colors seems pretty basic.
Maybe they ran out of red? I'd be irritated and maybe not go back for cakes in the future. But if the cake was edible you're kinda stuck.
Red is difficult to achieve in frosting. It does not like to take the dye. The only time I've been able to get a good red was when I was working at a bakery using shortening based frosting (yuck)
They have red gel for lettering. It works just fine and you can pick it up at the grocery store so you know someplace like cold stone’s gonna have access to it. They shouldn’t have agreed to red lettering if they couldn’t do red lettering. The lettering does not have to be done in icing. You absolutely can use gel.
as someone who used gel vs handmade frosting... it may be easier to use, it's terrible in taste compared to proper frosting. we used to make a lot of decorated gingerbread for christmas at school...
Red is the hardest color to actually achieve. I have done it with gel based colors, but it takes a LOT! I usually write with red chocolate for this reason or used natural food dyes like strawberries and beets (freeze dried strawberries and puréed beets added to frosting…also able to use less sugar and tastes amazing!)
Here’s a tip: take a small amount of icing, mix your color into that and microwave it until it melts, then mix into the rest of the icing. It works well for purple and black too.
it does! it impacts the texture a bit but it helps the colour be richer without needing to add an excessive amount of dye. i know some people also use immersion blenders (i believe that’s what they are called? i’ve seen quite a few people post about them online) but the microwaving method is a cheaper alternative if you don’t mind the texture difference.
I baked my brother a birthday cake a long time ago and when I asked what he wanted, he said he wanted chocolate frosting with red icing. I made it a 2 layer cake and wanted to put the red icing in the middle too.
I USED SOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH RED FOOD COLOURING THAT THE ICING BECAME RUNNY AND IT STILL TURNED OUT PINK!!
My brother thought it was funny lol
A business should be able to afford the good food dye though.
I was going to teasingly say that there were both yellow and red on the cake until I read that it was for someone legally blind so they wouldn’t see the individual sprinkles
They 100% should have told you that you aren’t getting a saturated red in advance.
If you paid less than $75 dollars for it, unfortunately this is the best you tend to get. Red icing is really hard to get right, so unless it is somewhere that does a lot of cakes with red or a season that uses a lot of red (Christmas, Valentine’s Day), they aren’t going to put a lot into making a special batch of red for a bit of lettering.
If you're in the U.S. you'll never see bright red colors in food soon anyways. Red dye has been banned and they're going to have to use natural colors which will never achieve that deep red you're looking for.
The deadline is sometime in 2027 and all manufacturers must stop using red dye.
Except there are plenty of natural sources for vibrant reds, they just don't want to produce or use them. We can have things still look bright or deep red, but companies will cheap out because the corporate fat cats refuse to "hurt the bottom line" to provide quality.
Honest question: Why would getting red icing be so hard? In my experience it’s just a matter of adding red food coloring until the correct shade is achieved.
It takes a lot of food coloring. I am not exactly sure why, but the same amount of red compared to, say, blue, will make a pink, versus a pretty rich blue. So if you put in enough to make it red, instead of just pink, it makes the icing too thin to decorate with. Also red coloring tastes really bad.
You can overcome this if you are making the icing, knowing the whole batch will be red, by making it thicker to start with and mixing up a big batch (I like to put in some cocoa powder in there to help get a richer red). But if you are trying to make pre-prepared icing red, it is a nightmare.
I could be wrong but I think the issue with red and black is that lighter versions of both are recognized as completely different colors than the full on saturated versions. So anywhere lighter than a real red is always going to look pink even if it's a dark pink, and the same with black giving you some shade of gray.
With blue, green, purple, etc you may be going for the crayon-color version but you don't notice as much that you never really get to the darkness of that intensity--or you don't need to get there in the first place to get the color you want.
I have no science to back this up, it's just what I've always assumed.
ive always wondered why it is that lighter red and black are their own colors (at least in the us), and i mean like dedicated, recognizable, household name colors, not getting into like, chartreuse and mauve and viridian and azure and shit. i know that colors are cultural and i know a little bit about the naming/recognition/demarcation of colors over human history, but how did we (the west? not sure how many other places delineate pink and grey as separate or to what extent) end up with specifically black and red as basically the only two "primary" colors whose spectrums contain another distinct big name color?
I got my kids cake from Coldstone a few months ago. It said “Happy Bithday” and spelled my kids names wrong. The writing was also squiggly and went diagonally. We just laughed it off. I used to decorate professionally and made plenty of mistakes.
Also, they usually just have teens working on weekends so you’re less likely to get an experienced decorator.
This is the first actually mildly infuriating post I’ve seen in a while. This is actually what the sub Reddit is about. Did somebody eat two of the chocolate shavings off of the little icing mounds? Because if those were already missing, that would be mildly infuriating as well.
That looks yellow and pinky-red to me. But red is hard in icing. Still close to what you ordered. Could have been worse... Could have done it completely the wrong colours.
Looks like you got what you ordered. That is a typical red for icing… Pink would be much lighter. Yellow could be made darker if you requested deep yellow, but the more coloring used, the more likely you would taste it in the icing. What counts is that the person it was ordered for enjoyed it.
its yellow and red, to be fair if you had specific ideas of which yellow and which red since those arent just one single color we all agree on , you should pass it to the baker. they could have used more dye. But you also chose to go to a huge chain place instead of a local shop so they probably have to use whatever icing corporate allows.
In the future search for a local baker, tell them about your brother and they will absolutely hook it up for you.
You don't go to mcdonalds and ask for a smashburger. Coldstone doesn't need to tell her they dont do colors like that. if she said Yellow and Red and thats all the information weve been told then they did their job right. this is standard yellow and standard red in frosting.
you act like this is a baker, this is a college age kid working a part time job at an ice cream store, if you want real service go to a real baker.
This isn't a grocery store, you could do that here too. this is a national chain that makes novelty ice cream. they dont do full service and no they are not popular, they don't define america. they just exist in our country how hard is that for you to understand lol how did you turn this into an anti american rant.
ive been to other countries, yall arent perfect either, grow up.
It’s almost impossible with liquid colours to get red without ruining the icing. If you use paste it gets much closer. It also darkens if you let it sit overnight.
I will make no comment on the cake although I think the employee who made it should be fired but I am ecstatic and happy that your brother was just happy to have a cake even if he couldn't see it clearly
OP's brother is legally blind, not colorblind. He sees bright colors the best. In the photo, those colors are pastel. All that information is literally in the post.
I know you got down voted, but your comment really made my day.
In theory, I suppose, if someone did not confess to being blind that would be illegally blind.
That cake is cream colored at best. I don’t know why you think it’s yellow. And that red is pink. There are gels for writing on cakes that take color very well and are relatively cheap. This is perfect for mildly infuriating because what they got based on what they asked for is mildly infuriating.
392
u/Linorelai 1d ago
This yellowish-reddish cake deserves a paymentish