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.

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Today I used: