Butterfly Birthday Cakes

By lovinghomemade on September 2, 2012 • ( 1 )

Butterfly Cupcakes

I always have a book on the go; sometimes it’s “proper” literature and sometimes it’s good old-fashioned Chick lit. My all time favourite Chick lit heroine has to be Becky Brandon (née Bloomwood) of the Shopaholic series and I was re-reading some of them on holiday recently. In “Mini Shopaholic”, if you don’t know it, Becky has to give up shopping and discovers the joys of bartering instead. While I don’t have any Prada shoes or Mui Mui handbags, I can make cakes and even better I have a friend who is training to be a sports massage therapist (amongst other things). I took up running just over a year ago (a necessary evil when you bake a lot) and so cakes for massage is the perfect swap!

Vana’s daughter Abby is about to be 5 and she wanted a butterfly birthday cake for her party:

Butterfly Birthday Cake

I think cupcakes are the way forward as far as party cake for kids is concerned, to avoid having to cut up a cake and hand it out in napkins, so I made the butterfly cupcakes too.

The birthday cake is a two layer vanilla victoria sponge sandwiched with pink buttercream, covered in white sugarpaste. The pretty butterflies came from some previous bartering; another friend wanted to make a cake for her eight year old and asked for a lesson in decorating it. So in exchange for a cup of coffee I helped her out and afterwards she gave me the butterflies she had bought for it. The decorations are cut out from sugarpaste. I cut some more out and let them set hard to use as a topper for the cupcakes and dusted them with silver metallic effect powder. The cupcakes are also made from vanilla victoria sponge with vanilla buttercream. I alternated the cake case colour with the icing colour and sprinkled icing sugar over some of them and red glitter over all of them. What 5 year girl old can have a party without some glitter?

And if you’re wondering why there was no chocolate involved, I’ll be making Abby a cake for her actual birthday and that will be seriously chocolatey.