Butterfly on a Flower Cake
For Nicole's 3rd Birthday, December 2004
For Nicole's 3rd birthday, we chose a butterfly theme. Rather than simply a butterfly cake, I envisioned a butterfly resting on a flower for her cake. This cake ended up being a lot bigger than I had imagined! Luckily I was able to rearrange my fridge to be able to fit it. A cake like this has several stages and therefore I needed several days to work on it.
As you can see in the first picture, I used a round cake pan for the center of the cake and my 4 white Corelle souffle bowls to make several batches of small circles. For fun, I made some of the cakes chocolate and some plain white cake. The butterfly itself was made from a round cake pan. I basically cut the circle in half and flipped the two halves over, cutting the bottom edge slightly to get the right shape. The original thought here was that this split in the butterfly wings would enabled me to bend the wings upwards as if the butterfly was just resting, but to no avail! The wings were just too heavy to get them to sit at an angle, so I finally relented, and laid them flat on the flower.
The colors on the butterfly as well as the yellow of the flower were all done with cupcake sprinkles. I had to press them into the frosting to make them stick well. And the final touch-- pipe cleaner antenna.
