How to Make Edible Gold Paint

Making super-shiny gold edible paint at home is incredibly easy, and you only need a few ingredients.

The most common way to make edible paint is with powdered food colour and alcohol, but that paint leaves a powdery finish and is very easy to smudge. Adding one different ingredient can create a paint that is smudge-free and gives extra shine to your metallic paint.

But while I am from a distant past where we had to do most cake decorating from scratch, and supplies were much more limited than they are now, you might be wondering…

Why make edible metallic paint when you can buy it ready-made?

Look, I love a ready-to-go product as much as the next time-pressed cake decorator, but there are a couple of occasions where making your own edible paint is better than buying it.

1. You need more pigment/opacity – ready-made paints aren’t always highly pigmented and can sometimes be a bit watery. When you make your own paint, you can better control the amount of colour and the consistency of the paint.
2. You want a custom shade – ready-made paints are limited in their shade ranges, and sometimes you might be trying to match a colour that’s on an invitation, or an object.

While these instructions are for making gold edible paint, you can really make any shade you like by choosing other metallic powders or mixing different powdered edible colourings.

This paint can be used on many edible surfaces, including fondant, ganache, chocolate, modelling chocolate, royal icing and macarons.

Gold Paint Ingredients

Here are the three ingredients you’ll need to make the shiniest edible gold paint at home.

Edible Gold Dust

There are many different metallic lustre brands on the market, and the key is to find one approved for use on food in your country, as approval processes and requirements vary by country.

Some lustres are considered “non-toxic” but are not approved as edible. This means they can be used on decorations that will not be eaten, but they shouldn’t be consumed.

If you’re planning to use the gold paint on something that will be eaten, like on fondant icing covering a cake, a gold drip, or on decorated cookies, you need to find a lustre dust that is classed as edible.

There are various different shades of gold, and each brand is slightly different, so you may have to try out a couple that are available where you live, and see which one gives you the colour you like.

Confectioner’s Glaze & Rose Spirit

Confectioner’s glaze is the magic ingredient that makes this paint transfer-proof as it dries completely and seals in the colour. It’s also what makes it gloriously shiny.

Also known as edible glaze or food glaze, it’s a common product used to create a shiny coating on candies like jelly beans and chocolates, and it’s also used to coat some medications.

It can be used by itself in cake decorating to add a shiny layer onto fondant or gumpaste (I use it sometimes when I want to store fondant cake decorations for a long time), or it can be used as we are here, to mix up an edible paint.

Because the glaze is alcohol-based, it requires alcohol to thin down the paint and to clean up afterwards. It needs to be a high % alcohol, like cake decorator’s alcohol (also known as rose spirit) or Everclear. Vodka is not strong enough.

The glaze and alcohol can both be bought from a cake decorating store or online. For glaze, I’m not loyal to any brand; I use whatever I have on hand. For cake decorator’s alcohol, I just try to find the one with the highest % alcohol I can find.

This is my first time using the Sprinks one pictured, and it’s probably not strong enough for my liking, but we’re rolling with it today because it’s what I have.

Optional: Gold food colouring

If you’re making a gold ganache drip on a cake or want to paint a large area of fondant gold, it can be helpful to colour the ganache or fondant with a gold gel first.

The gel doesn’t make the icing metallic, but gives it a warm yellow colour that requires less gold paint to make the metallic gold opaque. If you can’t find gold gel, use yellow and a tiny dab of brown.

Tools and Supplies

• Paintbrushes – Using good-quality paintbrushes is important to get a nice finish. For thin lines or words, a fine, pointed-tip brush is best. To paint gold over a whole cake, or any larger area, use a wide flat brush. Sweet Sticks has a great selection of brushes in different shapes and sizes. I also like the Sugar Crafty brushes.
• Toothpicks – or ice cream sticks, to stir the paint. I also have these little plastic spoons with a flat edge, which I really like using for this purpose.
• Droppers/pipettes – A dropper is handy for adding glaze and alcohol to the gold powder, a few drops at a time, to get the right consistency.
• Small container – A small container with a lid is great for mixing the paint in, as you can pop the lid on and store the paint to use later. If you don’t have a container with a lid, you could use a paint palette, or even the lid from a bottle, and just mix up a small amount of paint at a time, to prevent wastage.

I recommend rolling out a test piece of fondant or keeping a spare cookie aside to test out the consistency and colour of the paint.

Stir gently until the powder and glaze are well combined.

Pop the lid onto the paint until you’re ready to use it.

Tips for Painting With Metallic Edible Paint

• Stir the paint regularly while painting, as the pigments will naturally sink to the bottom.
• If the paint begins to dry out too much, or if you want a lighter wash of colour, add more glaze, or add some alcohol, just a few drops at a time until you get the consistency you want.
• If you want to do more than one layer of paint, let the first layer dry completely first.
• For more painting tips, see my Cake Painting Tutorial and Painting on Cookies tutorial.
• To clean your paintbrushes, put a small amount of cake decorator’s alcohol or everclear into a small container and swish the brushes in the alcohol to clean them. I usually follow that up with a quick wash in some warm water with dishwashing liquid. Gently press the bristles back into shape, then leave them to dry.