I shared this chocolate butterfly tutorial at the end of the summer over on Practically Functional and wanted to share it with you all today! The colors of the monarch butterflies are perfect for any fall parties that you have coming up and would be wonderful for a unique Thanksgiving dessert.
Here are the supplies I used to make these cute cupcakes:
- Dark chocolate boxed cake mix (because I am not a baker…I decorate!)
- Mini cupcake pan and paper liners
- Buttercream icing from scratch (recipe below)
- Wilton candy melts in dark chocolate
, yellow and orange - Wilton Candy Decorating Bags
(to melt chocolate and pipe with) - Nonpareils
- Wax paper
- Toothpicks
- #21 Wilton icing tip
, 
and 
After baking the mini chocolate cupcakes and setting them aside to cool completely, I started making the butterflies. I drew a wing shape on a piece of tracing paper (regular paper is fine), attached it to a clipboard and added a piece of wax paper over it. This gave me a pattern for 9 butterflies at a time on a hard surface that fit easily into my frig.
After following the directions on the Wilton packaging on how to correctly melt the chocolate, I was ready to go with all three bags of my melted chocolate. FYI…the yellow and orange definitely took longer to melt than the dark chocolate.
I cut a tiny piece out of the tip of the decorator bag. Start small…you can always cut more away. Tip: depending on how fast you can work, you might want to do half a wing at a time as the chocolate is hardening as you go. Experiment first to figure out the best way for you. I messed up a few at first, but I ate all the evidence!
1. Using the dark chocolate first, pipe out the shape of the wings.
2. Add yellow chocolate to the top part of the wings, orange to the bottom. Be pretty generous so that it fills in the space. Tap on your surface (mine was my clipboard) to spread the chocolate out.
3. Use a toothpick to lightly pull some of the dark chocolate into the colored sections to create a marbling effect. You can then tap the surface again to spread the chocolate a bit more.
4. Add a sprinkle of nonpareils to the edges of the wings. When all 9 are done, put your surface into the refrigerator to harden the wings.
Here’s what my refrigerator looked like during the process!! You do not have to harden the chocolate in the frig. It will harden on its own just be sitting out. However, I wanted to speed up the process.
To create the body of the butterfly and “glue” the wings on, I put a piece of wax paper on the side of a baking pan. I piped a body and antennae into the corner of the pan on the waxed paper and then placed the hardened wings into the soft chocolate. The butterflies went back into the frig to harden.
During the production of making 36 butterflies, I talked the husband into making the buttercream icing! He did a great job! Here is the recipe he used:
- 1 cup unsalted butter…very soft
- 8 cups confectioners sugar
- 1/2 cup milk
- 2 tsp vanilla
- pinch of salt
Cream the butter and add 4 cups of sugar, milk, vanilla and salt. Beat until creamy, adding remaining sugar gradually until desired consistency is reached.
This recipe makes A LOT of icing. I only used 1/2 of it for the cupcakes.
I used a #21 piping tip
to add the icing and placed the finished butterflies on top. The event I made these lovely creations for was an end of the summer party. I had a large tray to carry them over to my neighbors house which made a great presentation! Monarch butterflies were migrating at that time, so the presentation kind of resembled that event!
I hope you will try your hand at these adorable and tasty cupcake toppers. I think they would be a great addition to your Thanksgiving dessert table. I want to give credit to the blog I got this fun idea from…you can find her tutorial here.
For more fun cake and cupcake decorating ideas, you might also like to check out these posts:
And did you know?? You can learn the Wilton way of cake decorating right on Craftsy! Check out the entire Wilton series with Beth Somers here!
I link up at these great parties!
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