How to Decorate a Butterfly Cupcake

I love cupcakes, the main reason is that one serving of your average cake is 1/12 of a cake and you can make 24 cupcakes out of one cake recipe.  So if you eat one cup cake, you eat ½ of a serving of cake.  You enjoy your cake, yet get half the cake calories. That’s a win-win situation. I also like to decorate them as long as I don’t need a pastry bag to make it happen.  I was looking for something to please my Mother who collects butterflies.  I found a butterfly cupcake here:  http://www.marthastewart.com/266904/butterfly-cupcakes?czone, but I’m not Martha Stewart, so I will make it my way.  So here we go.

Supplies:
Cupcake (whatever kind you want)
Frosting (again whatever kind you want)
Pretzels (one for each wing, two wings for each butterfly)
Hard candy (I use Life Savers, although I have make sucker candy and used it before)
Plastic bags
Hammer
Small candies:  Jellybeans, M & M’s, licorice nibs, etc., etc., etc.
Scissors
Knife
Foil
Cooking spray
Cookie Sheet

Preheat oven to 225°.  Line the cookie sheet with foil and spray the foil with cooking spray.  Put the pretzels baked side down on the foil, making sets like wings.

Put Life Savers, one per one empty space in the pretzel, all of one color, in a double lined plastic bag. 

Take you hammer and smash them to smithereens. 

Use a spoon and fill the empty hole on one wing with the smashed hard candy.   Fill the mirror hole on the other wing with the same color.

Repeat with a second color and a different set of holes, and then a third color, and the final set of holes.

Put the pan with the butterfly wings into the 225° oven for 15-18 minutes, or until all the smashed candy pieces have melted together into a solid sheet.  Remove from the oven and let cool.

Frost you cupcake.  Put the set of wings at an angle (forming a V) in the center of the cupcake.  You may put a piece candy under each wing to help prop it into place.

For the body parts of the butterfly, I cut off of the rounded tops of 3 black Jelly beans and placed them between the two wings.  I cut some very small strips of a black licorice nibs to make the antenna of the butterfly (you could use black shoe lace licorice).   I stuck them in the end I had decided was the head. 

Well your butterfly cupcake is done.  Isn’t it lovely?  Enjoy.