Cupcake Birthday Cakes

 
Our family has grown so big that it's now beginning to be almost impossible to get everyone together on one date for birthday parties. We end up postponing over & over...

This weekend, we finally did catch-up and combined 4 birthday's into one party. Didn't want to bake 4 individual cakes (would have been too many leftovers) so I looked for ideas for arranging cupcakes and made cakes for 2 of the celebrants out of one cake mix. 

 

 



 My husband then made a rum cake for his dad & a vegan key lime pie for his vegan sister. We sang "Happy Birthday" and blew out candles four times in a row.

Butterfly Birthday Cake

Well I usually don’t blog much about cooking because it’s more of a chore to me than a pleasure. I really have to be in the mood (thank goodness my hubby LOVES cooking and is GREAT at it). But I do enjoy sculpting cakes now and then & over the weekend I created a butterfly cake for our great niece’s birthday. She said it was “awesome”. It took me hours to do, I wondered how I get these crazy ideas into my head & think they will be so simple to do.

I mostly scoured the internet for ideas on how to cut the shape and for designs on the wings. I cut out a few circles the size of the cake pan & experimented first to see which shape I liked best.  I recommend freezing the cake layers before cutting & frosting, it helps the icing spread on the cut edges. I used food coloring to make a few colors & free formed the pattern, clipping an edge off a ziplock bag & piping on the frosting. I also ended up adding a piece of cardboard for the tail because the cake was too thin to stand up & frost.