Flowers and Butterflies: A Birthday Cake

One special tradition in our family is that I always bake and decorate a cake for our kids' birthday parties. On the morning of their party, they go out somewhere with Daddy while I prepare the house for the party and decorate the cake. I'm not an expert with icing by any stretch of the imagination, but I try to make up for it with a bit of creativity.

This year, Emma was having a butterfly and flower theme for her 4th birthday party. I was initially going to make a butterfly cake and a few people passed along some good ideas and pictures of cakes they had made. In the end, I decided to make a flower cake and add butterflies to it.

I started by making a marble cake (made a vanilla cake and a chocolate cake and swirled them together) in an angel food cake pan. I used some of the leftover batter to bake chocolate and vanilla cupcakes. I took one of the chocolate cupcakes and dropped it into the middle of the angel food shaped marble cake.

I then made butter cream frosting and used food colouring (yes, I know that natural dyes are possible too...but time and talent was a factor for me) to create the pink and purple that I wanted for the petals of the flowers and then yellow that I wanted for the eye of the flower. I then iced the cake, making the petals of the cake along the lines created by my cake form. I then added some yellow M&Ms to the eye of the cake and added some green M&Ms around the bottom of the cake.

Finally, I added a bunch of butterflies to the top that I purchased at the Museum of Nature gift shop in Ottawa.

Voilà

As I said before, I don't have much talent with the icing, but I was happy with the way it turned out and so were the kids.  If you want to see some past no-talent-needed birthday cakes, you can check out my Pink Panther Cake and my Lego Cake.

Comments

[Trippeduplife]

Sweet! What a wonderful idea. Thanks for sharing.

[Melissa]

I'm about to try a "sunshine" cake for my son's first birthday and am thinking about the "natural" icing option. Since I know that your opinions on these tends tend to be closely aligned with my own, and since I'm still in my rookie mom year, can you talk about why you ended up choosing regular food dye? I get the "talent and time" factor, but I mean in terms of the health impact and how that might influence relatives who might feed your children in the future (I'm worried that the grandparents may think it's just fine to barrage my kid with artificial flavors and colors when he visits). I'm leaning toward using turmeric or saffron ($$!) to color the sunshine, but...yucky if it's detectable in a CAKE, right?

The butterfly cake is AWESOME, and what a great tradition! That's one lucky four-year-old.

[Gina]

I love it! My children are all grown now- my oldest daughter (28) does for her birdlings what I did for her! She told me recently that her favorite birthday cake of all time was when I made her a sunflower. Instead of food coloring, I used yellow M&M's, and filled in the petals with cream cheese frosting.

These years fly by so quickly...Cherish them. Every minute is precious! *smiling*

[Amber]

I would certainly eat a piece of that cake. Well done!

[Kristen]

Adorable!

I'm certainly no wizard with icing and cake decorations, but I've made cakes celebrating my kids' favorite themes/interests/passions/loves for all of their birthdays (e.g. cats and dogs, trains, Fantastic Mr. Fox, firetrucks, etc.). Sometimes these cakes look super-adorable. Sometimes they look a little...rough around the edges. But I've had a few people remind me that because they're made with so much love, my kids will appreciate them for years to come, and will most likely look back on them fondly.

Either that, or we'll all sit back some day and laugh about the time that Mom made a first birthday cake with "Happy Birthday" letters that looked like they were some sort of font from a horror film. ;-)

[phdinparenting]

Melissa:

We strive for a balanced diet in our homes and do avoid artificial colours and flavours when it is possible. However, we do let friends, grandparents, etc. spoil the kids to some degree when they visit with them (we were more careful when they were infants though). Our kids each have one birthday per year. Sometimes I need coloured icing, sometimes I don't. My daughter's birthday happens to fall at a time of year when I am working 60 to 70 hours per week. I just don't have the time to spare to play with colours that might not work out. I don't really bake anything with icing at all except those two times per year, so I would have to be purposely baking sugary icing topped treats at other times of the year just to test it out, which seems a bit silly too. I guess it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal for me for such little exposure to it.

[Melissa]

Thanks, Annie! Makes perfect sense to me. I talked with a chef friend about using saffron, and I'm trying to decide if I have the guts to try it for the first time on this cake (I'm a pretty good cook, but I'm no baker, and I'm...I'll say "challenged" when it comes to decorating). Grandma is bringing sunshine cupcakes for everyone else (full of artificial coloring and flavoring "goodness"), but I really want to make my son's cake myself, for all the reasons that you and others have discussed here. Cross your fingers for me! And for being such a great inspiration for the newbies like me.