Butterflies and toffee

For a five-year-old birthday party, a pink butterfly cake was requested. It’s regular chocolate cake on the inside (can’t go wrong with that!), with ganache and then tinted fondant. The ribbon is made out of a new toy I bought, the Wilton Fondant Ribbon Cutter. A Trademe vendor was selling the set at a discount, and I always have trouble cutting straight even lines, and figured the emboss effect would give an added dimension to some of my cakes as well. It’s nifty, but the rolling part doesn’t work so well – the nut comes undone as you roll, and although it won’t come completely undone on the length of one ribbon, I had to tighten it after each one. If I roll the other way it tightens until it won’t roll at all. So, clever effects, and my ribbons are definitely looking better, but mildly annoying.

The butterflies are all tinted fondant, made a couple of days in advance so they’re nice and hard (less tasty, but still edible!). And the birthday girl looked quite chuffed when she peered into the box, so hopefully it went down well!

This one was for someone I made a chocolate caramel cake for at Christmastime – they wanted another. They told me to do whatever I wanted for decoration, and I figured toffee would be a good match for caramel, so I drizzled a little over the ganache, and then made some crazy toffee shapes to stick into the cake. Mmm, crunchy sugar!

The same person wanted some orange cupcakes, filled with cream and topped with orange icing. I used this recipe, which makes a nice, moist, citrusy cake, and cut little cones in the tops of the cupcakes to fill with cream, then topped with orange buttercream. I think the buttercream looks a bit too yellow – I’m not sure why, but the colour of these cupcakes doesn’t appeal to me – but it seemed silly to use colouring for no real reason.