For the grand occasion of Aunty Martha's 60th birthday, the often-baker but never-baked-for lovely lady requested the butterfly cake. Naturally, Martha and Mrs Martha obliged!
However, we decided that a lady of mature years deserved something far more sophisticated that bright yellow icing and red smarties - so we went with purple icing (the birthday girl's fave colour apparently), large silver cachous and smaller rainbow ones, along with the ubiquitous licorice and buttercream icing.
In terms of difficulty and timing, this was quite a good cake - with the mad cake decorating skillz of Mrs Martha, it was a snap. We had quite a big cakeboard to fill, so we decided to make a double quantity of the basic buttercake, and put half into our round 20cm cake tin and the rest into patty cases to make mini cakes.
The cake mix was whizzed up with the electric beaters in about 10 mins and all was in the oven in preparation for decorating.
We spent a bit of time, while the cakes baked, in the Essential Ingredient in Kingston - where we picked up my new favourite toy, the icing pen. A little silicon syringe, and it makes piping writing the easiest thing ever!
Once the cakes were out and cold, I recruited Mrs Martha to cut it according to the template. Although crummy, this cake proved relatively simple to ice even on the cut sides. We had a minor catastrophe with the icing when we added too much purple, but the timely addition of some red colouring soon put things right.
With tiny little wings made from dark chocolate, some whitened buttercream and patty cakes, we had some cute little cupcakes to complement the big butterfly and I think overall it worked out very well.
Time taken: 2-3 hours
Degree of difficulty: 6 (icing cut cake = hard)
Taste: 8.5 (tangy lemon icing helped!)
Success: I would rate this cake an 8 out of 10 all round.
Prototype:
Our attempt:
And just for fun! Martha (front), Big Cousin Martha (behind), and Little Cousin Martha (background)
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