I’m making a cake for a musical’s cast party.  The musical uses neon and brightly colored sets and props and they want the cake to be the same way.  My cake will be coated in fondant and I’ll be making various 2-D fondant cuts outs to apply to the side of the cake.  I don’t have an airbrush; I usually color my fondant with paste or dry food coloring.  Any suggestions on how to make brightly colored/neon fondant?

If you are starting with white fondant, you would need so much color that it will make the fondant quite slack;I have better luck using the neon gel colors from Chefmaster and of those, get the best results for lime green and bright yellow.  if you are able, I would suggest buying the small pre-colored buckets of fondant (Satin Ice and FondX are two brands that come to mind).  The Satin Ice colors are quite vibrant (I would only describe the pink as “neon”) but it gives you a starting point to which you can add more color without ending up changing the texture of the fondant.

If you are going to paint the fondant, use airbrush color - it will dry whereas gel or liquid color stays tacky.  You can mix custom colors from airbrush colors so you aren’t limited to what you can buy (just like paste or gel colors).

I ended up going with Duff Goldman’s Electronic Colors and to my surprise they were wonderful.  They’re vibrant gell colors that come in a four pack.