The Most Beautiful Cupcakes I Have Ever Made!

Well, here they are...the most beautiful cupcakes I have ever made.

1. Did they take forever? Yes. Two days.
2. Were they as easy as the cookbook described? No.
3. Did I use unladylike words at certain moments when things did not go as planned? Yes. ( I frightened our dog, Beaker, at one point)
4. Were they worth it? Absolutely!!!

In fact, this inspired some future new baking endeavors that will be coming soon!


So, how did I make them? Here is the evolution from finish to start.


Actually the hardest part was the last, putting the butterflies on the cupcakes. For some reason, the book said all you needed was two brown M&Ms to support the butterflies such that the wings were tilted. It was a lie and I just couldn't get those wings to tilt without falling off. I broke one wing in the process- (cue the unladylike words).


I bought 14 oz of M&Ms in order to get those brown M&Ms. How many brown ones did I find: About 12. How many did I really need? About 60. Remember when there were two colors of brown M&Ms? Well, the blue has taken over. So, I switched to yellow- which coincidentally is the second least common color in my bag. (cue unladylike words)


The antennae were also tricky but I anticipated this and made a lot of them. I broke quite a few but still had enough.

Actually I loved working with the candy melts for the antennae and butterflies. While they aren't super high quality, I discovered that it is easy to write shapes and initials with them and they harden very quickly. I will definitely be exploring these for future decorations!


I modified the butterfly pattern to be a bit more swirly ( see above) and not quite as pointed as the book recommended (see photo below).

When I made the butterflies with the points, the texture wasn't as pretty. I piped the chocolate melts first and filled with the orange. But the chocolate melts were already hardened and that made it difficult to pull through (again, unladylike words). Then I started piping both chocolate wings, filling with the orange and then microwaving it for 5 seconds to get things melting again to pull or swirl. This took a long time.

I traced the butterfly pattern from the book and put waxed paper over the top.

You can see these butterflies emerged from simple candy melts.

And this was the initial inspiration! In fact, I bought the cookbook, Hello Cupcake, solely for this recipe. They have a blog and a neat website with cupcake challenges!

So that's it! Again, my inner Martha is totally satisfied even though I still have to clean the kitchen...