Those are butterflies, baby!

It's hard to believe, but one of the girls who graduated with my son is having a baby.  Her mom called me up and asked me to make cupcakes.  She asked me for purple and butterflies.  When I initially asked her how many, she said about 30.  That's totally doable.

I scoured through Pinterest for some inspiration and came up with a plan.  I bought my butterfly fondant cutters and all my food coloring.  I stocked up on all my ingredients.  I called Mom again to finalize the numbers.  She quite sheepishly said more people were coming than originally thought....like 78-80!  AAGHHH!  OK, breathe, I can do this.  I said "No problem, piece of cake." On the inside, I was still trembling.

I am a true procrastinator by default.  No matter how I try, I procrastinate.  I drive myself a little batty.  I was determined with this big of an order I was not going to do that.  I cut out all of the butterflies mid week (order was due Saturday) so they would have plenty of time to dry.  I baked all the cupcakes on Friday.  Saturday morning, I frosted all of them.  WOOO, not procrastinating!  I get everything done right away on Saturday morning and I still have lots of time left.  I decide cupcakes are not enough so I make a mini 6-inch cake.  I thought that would be a nice touch and something they could take home after the shower.

I must be crazy.  Why do I do this to myself?  Ugh...here we go.  I make the cake.  While it's baking, I decide the cake will be opposite from the cupcakes.  The cupcakes are frosted with purple and have white butterflies.  That means I have to add food coloring to my leftover fondant to make it purple.  SMH.  Where are the little baking elves to help me?  OK, I colored my remaining fondant purple.  CRAP, I need fondant for the cake.  I make a small batch of fondant to cover the cake.  The cake is cooling, the fondant is resting, the purple butterflies are drying...almost done.  The Heavens were smiling on me because the cake went together beautifully.  By smiling, I think they were just taking pity on me just this once.

I take the cake and cupcakes to the venue with plenty of time to spare, a small miracle again.  I set everything up and take my picture.  Mom is happy, momma-to-be is happy, guests are happy.  I am just too relieved to have any other emotions.

Now that I have had some time to reflect on the way things turned out, I think I'm pretty happy too.

Pitter patter of little feet

My daughter asked me to bake cupcakes for her boss’ baby shower.  I asked my daughter what kind of cupcakes she wanted, but there was no real answer other than “she’s having a boy, she likes teal and she’t not a girlie girl.”  So….this is what I came up with.

I made chocolate cupcakes and vanilla cupcakes.  When they cooled, I colored the buttercream frosting and then put it in the microwave for about 15-20 seconds.  This made is somewhat of a glaze consistency.  I dipped the cupcakes in the frosting and then put them in the refrigerator to harden a bit.

I got a packet of stencils at the store a while back, and I found some baby stuff on one of the stencils.  I could not get the other things to come out in a manner that would be recognizable; so after much trial and error, I decided to make “pitter patter of little feet” cupcakes.  I took white buttercream, put it in the microwave for about 15 seconds and then poured it into a squeeze bottle (you could also use a piping bag and a small round tip).  I held the stencil over the cupcake and then filled it in with the white buttercream (think Royal Icing on cookies). 

I thought they were just about as cute as the day is long…I hope they went over well at the shower.

Butterfly cupcakes

Butterfly cupcakes

BUTTERFLY CUPCAKES

When my daughter had her second child, I decided that instead of having the traditional girls-only baby shower, I would do a big family party.  As it turns out, she delivered the baby 3 weeks early, so it turned into a “meet the new baby” party.  We also did not want to leave our granddaughter out of the celebration, so we combined “meet Baby Chase” with “Maddie’s a big sister.” 

Since there would be several small children at the party, I decided against a cake.  Instead, I thought about making cupcakes, of course.  I made a chocolate box mix cake (since I had so much else to do to prepare) and then made a basic buttercream frosting.  I used Wilton green gel food coloring to tint the buttercream.  I then used Wilton Candy Melts in light cocoa to trace the outline of the butterflies.  Once these were set, I used more of the candy melts and tinted them with Wilton gel food coloring in pink and blue.  I filled in the outlines with the pink or blue and then tapped the counter to smooth out the tinted chocolate and get out any bubbles.  I then detailed the wings with more melted light cocoa.  The final step was to make the butterfly bodies by making a small line on wax paper with the light cocoa melt and adding the wings.