Tagged: butterfly

Daintiest Butterfly Cupcakes

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My kiddo’s birthday is coming up and I’m all about special birthdays. The one thing she asked for was a butterfly cupcakes for her class. I’d done the Hello, Cupcake butterflies before for her first birthday but wanted to try out a new technique. This one was super challenging as the wings kept breaking, but I finally managed to get them done. I present the daintiest butterfly cupcakes I’ve ever done.

They ended up looking gourmet, but I kid you not, that’s Pillsbury Funfetti cake there (from a box). So yellowish cake with some sprinkles in it and plain ol’ vanilla frosting. The butterflies were done with this technique with melting candy wafers. They turned out lovely but really, I should’ve practiced more. Some tricks and tips for these cupcakes:

  • Pipe enough on the outlines so that they don’t break at the edges and thin on the inside so that they make the lacy effect. It takes some playing around and careful hands.
  • As soon as you’re done piping and you are folding the wings together, make sure you aren’t pushing down hard to get the mirror impression (for the other side of the dainty wings). I got a bit of a technique down by doing half the wings, folding them, flipping them to the other side and just lightly tapping on all parts of the wings so that they stuck to the other side of the wax paper (and then opening them, as the tutorial goes).
  • I let the wings set three ways: Open air, in the refrigerator, and in the freezer. The freezer worked best. Since the wings were so thin, sometimes they wouldn’t set correctly on the counter. In the fridge they took a bit of time (and I was in a hurry) so I put them in the freezer and that seemed to work best.
  • It also helped to peel them in the freezer (me standing outside an open freezer door, holding the butterflies in the freezer).
  • Food tweezers! Again, so thin, these butterflies were melting at the touch of my hand… so to set them in, I used food tweezers/tongs. Much easier.
  • I think next time, I’ll probably try the dual color ones or perhaps adding non-pareils for a more delicate touch.

Today I used:

Pizzettes, part 1

Today’s lunch was about hearts <3 🙂 When there are a lot of “feelings” around my house (hurt feelings, frustrated feelings, jealousy feelings, etc.) I try to make sure the kiddo knows there are love feelings, too. Last night, she was really jealous of her sister and so we had a talk and lots of hugs but this morning, when I found out I still had a heart-shaped “pizzette” in our freezer pizza stash, I knew it was meant to be. I actually have made quite a few pizzette shapes for her lunches but am still perfecting the way to get them both delicious AND attractive… right now, melting cheese is my nemesis 😛 Until now, I was pre-cooking and freezing the pizzas and then re-heating in a toaster oven, which makes them melt and spread even more. Hmmm… I think next time I’ll pre-cook with just the sauce and add the cheese afterwards when I’m re-heating. In the butterfly below, I kinda did that and added some extra cheese but they didn’t heat up enough to melt properly (mainly because the butterfly already had cheese on it and I didn’t want it burning.

Anyhow, here they are!

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(Hearts lunch above)

Main Cheese Pizzette (there were two, one underneath the heart) with ranch for dipping.Teeny cheese heart in the ranch dressing.
Sides Grape hearts and a heart cookie.
Also included (not pictured) a sliced kiwi


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(Butterfly lunch above)

Main Cheese Pizzette with ranch for dipping.
Sides Dried blueberries, grape flower and raspberry center
Also included (not pictured) a sliced kiwi and a yogurt


Today I used: