I followed a blog’s link to another blog link to another blog link to the point that I don’t remember where I started out & where I ended up. However, I THINK I started at Cupcakes Take the Cake. I ended up at a video where Karen Tack from Hello Cupcake! fame was demonstrating making chocolate candies using a template.
Hello Cupcake! should be in your cake library.
It blew me away with how cool looking the butterflies she made were. This looks VERY doable. I have a birthday cake I’m going to be doing for my father’s birthday coming up January 18, 2009. This is perfect! I have a wonderful excuse to make butterflies. Ok, maybe butterflies aren’t the most masculine thing, but Daddy’s getting one or more butterflies on his cake.
Candy butterflies as they looked on the wax paper.
The color scheme doesn’t take any time to work out. I’m going to make a Red Velvet Cake so red butterflies would go good. Yellow goes well with red out there in the world of nature so red & yellow will be the color scheme. An artist I’m not so drawing the template to use is totally out of the question. I give some thought to searching on the internet for a picture of a butterfly I can use as a template. Nope, that could take quite a while looking at all those images.
Remembering that I have 2 butterfly cookie cutters, I wonder if one of them would work. A pencil won’t give me a wide enough line if I trace the cutter so that’s not going to work. I can’t use a marker because I use these cutters to make cookies with so that’s not a good idea. Ahhh I wonder if I could manage to use one of the printers to make a copy of the cutters. It works so now I have my template.
Pull the red & yellow candy melts out of the rolling tool chest. A lot of my cake tools are in the rolling tool chest as I talked about in the November 16 post. Get the wax paper & a couple of sandwich bags out of the cabinet and I’m ready to go to work. I have a small round table in a dining nook that I usually use for my cooking projects and that’s where I set up my supplies for this project.
Cut a piece of wax paper off the roll & cover the butterfly copy with it. Placed a handful of red candymelts in the sandwich bad & did NOT close it. Put the sandwich bag in the microwave & pressed it for 30 seconds. Checked the contents and they were soft but not melted so I put them back in the microwave & pressed for 15 seconds. I continued this process until they were thoroughly melted. Then I closed the sandwich bag & snipped a small hole in the corner of the bag.
A close up of one of the candy butterflies
Then I carefully squeeze the contents out of the bag following the outline of the template. I used a toothpick to spread it out to cover the design thoroughly. Then I moved the wax paper so I had a clear area over the template & did another butterfly outline. I also make the antenna for the butterflies out of the red candy. Not being sure how many butterflies I want to use & wanting extras in case of breakage, I decide to make 4 butterflies.
Once I have finished the outline & antennas, I repeat the process with yellow candy melts. I use the yellow to fill in the wings of the butterflies. They sort of blend together at the edges but that’s just fine for the look of butterflies. Slid a small cookie sheet under the wax paper & moved the butterflies to the freezer for about 10 minutes. After that, I pull them out & my butterflies are good to go. I carefully pulled them off the wax paper & placed in the middle of a stack of wire racks sitting on the table. That’s it. Just as simple to do as Karen Tack claimed in the video & in her book Hello Cupcake!
Tags: candy melts, chocolate candies, Cupcakes Take the Cake, Hello Cupcake, Karen Tack