Butterfly Cakes!!!

This past week I got to make a cake for a very good friend of mines daughter who was turning two! We were invited to her party on Thursday night so I tried to start prepping for this cake on Monday night. This was my first fondant free cake too (at least, for decorating).

See, making things like butterflies can take awhile and I've never made them before and they take time to dry. So I wanted to give myself a little extra time just in case of any mishaps. And I am sooo glad I did!

My friend pretty much gave me free rein on how to decorate the cake, she just said as long as there were butterflies on it. So my mind started reeling on how to make butterflies and flowers and make a cake cute enough for a two year old.

I read up on how to make butterflies using royal icing and then flooding it with flooding icing. I made all these outlines for butterflies and filled them all, let them dry and then they all broke when I tried to take them off the paper. I then figured that I made them too thin, so I redid it and made them thicker. They all broke again. I kept joking to Josh that butterflies were going to be the end of me :) Now I didn't mind that I was learning what worked and didn't. What was making me nervous was that it took forever for these butterflies to dry in the first place so by the time I found out that they were not going to work it was the morning of the party. Yeah, I was freaking out a little bit.

So I sat there in the kitchen on Thursday morning trying to think of a place I could go buy fake butterflies to put on the cake (even though I so badly wanted them to be edible!) when I remember that I had some sugar paste (gum paste) in the fridge. I figured, what the hay, I'll try it! So I colored it a few different colors with petal dust and rolled it out and then cut out wings for the butterflies. Then while they were drying I painted little designs on them with edible paint. And you know what? THEY WORKED!!! And, they were so much cuter then the royal icing things that all the books and websites told me to do (and took far less time! Seriously, the royal icing ones were taking 24 hours to just dry).

Here is the finished cake! The birthday girl loved it and I happened to think they were pretty cute too :)