I love butterflies as children can really use their imaginations and decorate with lots of candy and sprinkles, and they still look like butterflies. With some other animal shapes, once a child (or me) has iced them, it can be hard to tell what animal it is.
So here is how to create a butterfly out of two heart cookies. Firstly rough ice the cookies. Any pale color icing is a good background for the sprinkles or candy. I used pink as it makes it more Valentines.
Then rough ice a cupcake in a different color icing, so that the butterfly stands out against the background.
Talking of backgrounds, sorry that the backgrounds on the photos keeps changing, I’m still learning which work best.
Then press the two hearts into the icing. You can press quite firmly as the hearts need to be stuck well to the icing. As you can see my icing really is rough. I used to spend ages trying to get it smooth, but with buttercream it’s very hard. You can use a very hot knife which makes it a bit smoother, but I find that people don’t usually care about the details, they just care about the overall impression and the taste of the cupcake. That is especially true for children.
When you see these amazing websites with awesome, perfect creations, what they never show you are the designs that didn’t work. I’m still at the experimenting stage and I will show you all the things that go wrong because a lot of them are funny.
My first thought for the butterfly’s body was a starburst (or opal fruit in England). I rubbed it between my fingers to soften it and then rolled it flat.
It looked OK until I tried to add eyes, and then it all went wrong. These eyes are from Wilton (available at Joann or any craft store), but they tend to make everything look like a Simpson’s character.
Then I tried M&M’s which was even worse, and now my husband has just pointed out that the starburst looks like a severed finger.
Then because I’d been using the sour patch straws this morning I tried one of them. It was a bit better but I still didn’t like it.
So I reverted to my usual mini M&M’s and cut the sour patch straws in half for antennae. It was simple and much more effective.
Then I added some heart shaped sprinkles to finish it off. I could have got all fancy and made patterns with candy or piping, except I had to get my son from preschool and I ran out of time.
I’d made the icing last week (it will keep for about 3 weeks in a sealed container in the fridge) and baked and froze the cupcakes earlier in the week. They will keep for about a month in the freezer; after that they get a bit of a musty taste to them. I made the cookie 3 days ago and kept them in an airtight tin. They only keep about 4 days before they go soggy and they don’t freeze well.
So I had 30 minutes this morning to play about and this is what I created. I never have time to spend hours decorating something so anything you see on this blog can be created in about 10-15 minutes. I dream about the day when I can spend hours creating some masterpiece, but I don’t think it will ever happen, life always gets in the way.
Here is a slightly different butterfly. There were no failed attempts for this one, I just made a quick and easy design in the 5 minutes I had available.
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