Rainbow Fondant Letters Tutorial

How about creating upright standing 3D rainbow fondant letters for your cakes? Interesting?

Well, I tried making these rainbow-colored fondant letters for a rainbow-themed birthday cake, and I must say, I was very very pleased with the way they turned out.

Poster for making rainbow fondant letters

And making these pretty fondant letters was not hard. Let me show you how I made these rainbow beauties in my step by step tutorial below.

How to Make Rainbow Fondant Letters

These were the main supplies I used to make the letters:

Fondant - I used Satin Ice fondant. Though these letters were made standing upright, I did not use any CMC or tylose. The letters formed well and set hard nevertheless.
Food colors - I tinted the fondant in 7 colors to match that of a rainbow. And I used both Wilton as well as Americolor food coloring to create the rainbow color shades.
Fondant letter cutters - I purchased these from a local cake decorating supplies shop. And I must admit, I really really love using these cutters. They are perfect for making 3D lettering on cakes and I have used these cutters for many of my cake projects.
Extruder Tool and medium-sized round disc - I used the extruder tool fitted with a medium-sized round disc to create fondant strips in rainbow colors.
Fondant glue
Icing sugar to dust
Needle tool and rolling pin - The 2 tools assisted in removing the cutout fondant letters from the cutters.

And here's how I made the fondant letters:

Mixing the colors

The first step in making these rainbow-colored letters is to tint fondant in the colors of the rainbow. And here was how I mixed my colors:

Red - White fondant + Americolor Red Red
Yellow - Yellow fondant + white fondant
Orange - Orange fondant + white fondant
Green - White fondant + Americolor Avocado
Blue - Baby Blue Fondant
Indigo - White fondant + Americolor Royal Blue (2 parts) + Americolor Red Red (1 part)
Violet - White fondant + Americolor Electric Purple.

Forming the rainbow color combination in fondant

Next, using the extruder tool fitted with medium sized round hole, I piped out long strips of fondant, one in each of the seven colors of the rainbow.

I arranged the strips according in the color order of the rainbow, starting with red and ending with violet.
And then, I attached them together with fondant glue. I glued red and orange, yellow and green and blue and indigo first.

Applying glue with a brush to fondant strips in rainbow colors

Pushing rainbow colored fondant strips together with hand

Then I glued violet to the blue-indigo group.

And finally I joined the red-orange, yellow-green and the blue-indigo-violet groups together.

I used the help of a long ruler to level the sides so that the width of the strip is enough to fit the letter cutters.

Cutting the fondant letters

Next was cutting out the rainbow letters. For this, I positioned the rainbow-colored fondant strip diagonally and when pressing out the letters with the letter cutters, the cutters were positioned such that all the 7 colors could be seen in each letter and the colors appear diagonally in each of the letters.
And before pressing the cutters into the fondant, I dipped each of the letters cutters into icing sugar first for easy removal of fondant.

A letter H cutter on strips of rainbow colored fondant

Using a sugar craft knife to cut the fondant on which in a letter H cutter

And in removing the fondant letters from the cutters, I used a rolling pin to tap the letters out. I also used my needle tools to remove excess fondant from the cutters.

Using a needle tool to remove excess fondant of a fondant alphabet cutter

And this was how the complete set of rainbow fondant letters looked like. I let mine dry overnight and placed them on the cake with the help of fondant glue. You can also attach toothpicks to the bottom of each of the letters and poke them into your cake if you like.