Butterfly cake

It's a brand new year, but before I focus on January and my upcoming trip to Hawaii on the 12th, I want to post some pictures of a cake I made for the Christmas party at the fitness studio I go to. Rachel, the owner of Inner Fit Studios, knew all about my cake decorating classes and has been incredibly supportive, so I offered to bake a cake for her party. This post will have pictures from the decorating process along with recipes for the individual parts under the links.

I made a chocolate cake with raspberry cream filling and dark chocolate icing (recipe below), covered with raspberry flavoured fondant. It was topped with roses and a butterfly:


The preparations included making the roses ahead of time since they had to be dry when attached to the cake. I used leftover fondant from my bow cake and the flowers turned out beautifully! Once the flowers were made, I prepared my fondant by giving it a raspberry flavour using extract and then dyed it a deeper burgundy than the flowers. Fondant has to be stored tightly sealed or it will get hard; however, I have discovered that it is possible to revive slightly hardened fondant by using a little water and/or microwaving it in 5 second intervals. Here are six of the seven finished roses and the fondant wrapped in plastic:


Here is a close up of a rose:


I also prepared the butterfly ahead of time, but this could have been done anytime because it was really easy to make. Actually, it took a little trial and error to get it right, but when I figured out the method, it was easy. I attempted to make a butterfly using real chocolate at first, but couldn't get it liquid enough to pipe without seizing. Instead, I got a package of Wilton candy melts in "dark cocoa" to simulate dark chocolate. This stuff is great for piping because I just put some in a plastic decorating bag, stuck it in the microwave, and it came out melted! So how did I do it? I drew butterfly wings and taped them down on a cake board and topped it with wax paper like so:


The cake board made the entire project portable and the wax paper was great because it was see through and made it easy to peel the wings off after. I traced the wings using the candy melts and the only difficult part was making sure my hands stayed steady:


I could have left the piped wings out to harden, but I was impatient and stuck the entire cake board in the fridge for a few minutes. Then, I pulled it back out and propped them up using a plastic straw cut in half. The reason for this is so the finished butterfly won't be completely flat. Here is what the wings looked like on the straws:


And then I piped a head and body on top:


Once the cake was torted and covered with fondant, I attached the roses in the center with gum glue and used some more candy melts to make the butterfly stick. Lastly, I added little white fondant balls at the bottom to hide the "hem" of the burgundy fondant and here is another look at the cake:


As for the dark chocolate icing I used just before putting on the fondant, it was very thick and I had to slightly melt it to spread it. But it was really good and I would definitely use it again! Here's the recipe:

• Dark chocolate icing
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• 1/2 cunsalted butter
• 1/2 tspvanilla extract
• 2 cicing sugar
• 4 Tbspsoy milk
• 1 ccocoa powder
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• Cream butter and add vanilla and soy milk.
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• Sift icing sugar and cocoa powder together, mixing well. Add to butter and mix well.
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