My good friend’s daughter turned 7 last month. Seven!! Hard to believe sometimes. Does that ever happen to you where your friends kids are so much older than you thought they could possibly be?? Anyhow, we were talking about how they were going to celebrate and my favorite subject – BAKING – came up and she said, almost jokingly, “You can make something for her birthday if you want!” So of course I jumped at it! She mentioned wanting to decorate her room with butterflies and I said, “I have a new butterfly baking pan!” So I wormed my way into making the cupcakes for the birthday party. Or I guess in this case, not cupcakes, but cakelettes.
I just purchased a pan that has a couple different butterflies and another one with bugs – bumblebees, ladybugs, dragonflies – so cute and different, right?
I baked a couple cake mixes worth (I’m not very good at cakes from scratch…yet!) of batter and made a bunch of bugs and flowers and of course butterflies. Then the next day – its always easier to decorate your cakes and cupcakes the day after they’re baked – I started to make and color icing. I made a batch of the Wilton buttercream and tried to stick with easier colors just using my Wilton icing gels. Then I had to make a second batch of icing because I colored all of it and forgot to keep some white. Duh. They look really colorful don’t they? There’s really only 5 colors – pink, purple, yellow, green and white.
I mostly used the smaller star tips (16 and 18) and the medium-ish round ones (5 and 6). I had a coupler on the pink and purple bags because I used them the most but the other colors were just in parchment bags with their own tips.
It took me a few tries, but I think I ended up with some really cute ones! Of course I didn’t take a picture of the not-so-cute ones. 
My friend’s daughter really liked them! Even though we thought the butterflies would be her favorite, she actually liked the bumblebee on top! And I just put that one on at the last minute.
This was a really fun project! And the cool thing is, its really not that difficult! Honest!! Start small, try it with two tips and two colors. And remember, one of those colors could be white! I’d love to see what you come up with!
