Butterfly Cupcakes

I know...it's only been forever since I last posted.  But I'm not here to talk about that.  Birthday cupcakes!  I was tickled to death with these!  We decided to take the birthday cake eating to the park and so I figured cupcakes would work best.  The chosen subject was butterflies.

I saw this idea and LOVED it!   And totally forgot to take into account the heat and the fact that these would start melting the second we walked out the front door with them.  Not to mention, driving in our air conditioning-less vehicle.

At any rate, these are perfect for having in an air conditioned house in Florida in May.  I drew out the shape of the wings, melted some wilton candy melts in plastic zip-loc bags with a little hole cut in the corner (about 10-12 seconds at a time, taking it out and mashing them around in between, until they're good and melted) , put wax paper over the pattern and went to work. I did the outline in the dark chocolate and then filled it in with pink.  I followed that by tapping the tray on the table so the holds would be filled in.  To do the swirls, you really have to do one wing at a time (unless, of course, I did this outside where it would stay melted!!!).  Before the candy hardened, I'd take the time of a sharp knife and pull a little swirl from the brown.  These are my stacks of wings.  40 something of them.  Yes.  It was time consuming.

On another piece of wax paper I just did a bunch of squiggly lines for the body and then did a little V for the antennae.

Putting them ON the cupcake was...interesting.  My cupcakes often come out rather tall in the middle and the wings really just wanted to slide down the cupcake hill.  As fun as that might be, I was having none of it.    I sliced the dome off of the cupcakes so they were fairly flat.  I iced them and I put an upside down chocolate chip on either side of the middle for the wings to rest on. (I guess a picture of that would have been helpful...oh well).  And then added the body and the antenna.