Butterfly Garden Cupcakes

This week, my husband came home with two new cupcake books for me to explore. One, "What's New, Cupcake?" is the follow-up to a book my mom got me, "Hello, Cupcake." These books show fun ways to decorate cupcakes for all sorts of occasions - baby showers, birthdays, holidays, pranks, etc. While they contain a few basic recipes, they're mainly full of edible decorative schemes. I realized, upon receiving the follow-up book, that I haven't made a lot of the designs form the first book. I found this awesome cookie dough cupcake recipe (to be posted soon), and decided to top these new cupcakes with a butterfly design found in "Hello, Cupcake." This turned out to be quite the endeavor. 

First, I had to make the wings of the butterfly. This involved lots of melting chocolate. Using an outline from the book, I piped the outline of the wings in dark chocolate melting wafers (which apparently work better than regular/"real" dark chocolate because it hardens faster and maintains its consistency pretty well when melted). Then, I filled in the wings with the color of my choice. The book recommended orange, so the butterflies would look like monarchs, but all I had was white and green. Once the outline was filled in (a technique I learned is called "flooding"), I took a toothpick and gently tried to bring some of the dark chocolate into the center to create the wing look. This took some practice - especially learning how long I had before the outline began to set. The first few looked a little "chunky" in the middle, because the melted chocolate had already started to harden by the time I started mixing. And while the wings are still melted and just beginning to set, I sprinkled some colored sugar and nonpareils on the tips for added effect (again, in the book, these are white to assist with the monarch look, but I just went with what I had). I then piped some chocolate antenna.

Once the cupcakes were cool, I frosted them in several colors (vanilla frosting tinted with my coloring gels), and then attempted to apply the wings. Placing a chocolate chip about 1/4 inch apart on the top, I propped the wings against the chocolate chips and piped a chocolate frosting body down the center. I didn't have much luck with the antenna turning out well, so a few of the butterflies have the antenna and most don't. Also, some of the wings oozed together during the cooling process, so for those the "complete" butterfly is just lying flat on top of the cupcake, instead of with its wings pointed up.

But most of them are flapping. Of course, there was the occasional casualty:

But in the end, most of the cupcakes turned out... well, if not perfect, then at least passable. 

I learned, in the end, that the thick chocolate fudgy frosting does a much better job at holding the wings in an upright position - but since I didn't discover this until the last four or five cupcakes, I guess I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed to see if they all survive the ride to work in the morning!

("Hello, Cupcake" is written by Karen Tack & Alan Richardson, and published by Houghton Mifflin. It, as well as "What's New, Cupcake" contain many playful ideas that are supposed to be "easy," but it would appear that my patience level and/or skill level are rather sub-par. I'm hoping to overcome that soon!)