happy birdycake: butterflies and cupcakes...

Here's a book we just bought!!!

We LOOOOVEEE all the ideas!

In anticipation of the butterflies that come into our butterfly bushes every june/july...

here are some butterfly (viceroy or monarch? ... to be determined this year) , we baked some butterfly mini cupcakes using the basic vanilla cupcake recipe from the book.

Delicious!

I must say the melted chocolate butterflies were more difficult than i expected. Working with hot melted chocolate in ziplock bags (as they recommend) made for hot hands and not a very steady stream of chocolate (thus look at how messy they are). Also the butterflies are meant to be bigger, for bigger cupcakes. To work in such a small scale and at that speed, trying to make sure the chocolate does not harden was challenging. Next time i will work big, buy more chocolate, and work one butterfly at a time ... not assembly line style, as i thought I could do!

So to re-cap...

Not meant for mini cupcakes

Use pastry bag with tips

Have a steady hand and use the template they provide!

They were fun to make though and honeypie had fun swirling the chocolate on the wings.

Back to our butterfly bush...

It will soon be home to some butterflies in this coming june/july . We are eagerly awaiting since it fills up with tons and it is just beautiful!

We are actually confused as to what they might actually be... viceroy? monarch?

This is a viceroy butterfly which looks alot like the monarch except it is smaller and has a black band across the center of the hind wing.

this is a monarch butterfly butterfly

this is a painted lady butterfly

We stumbled upon this book called "wings of flight" illustrated by Bruce Hiscock and written by Stephen r. Swinburne. The watercolor illustrations are beautiful and worth going to Bruce's website for some drawing ideas and just to hear him talk about his drawing/painting and love of nature, process. It is a beautifully illustrated book full of great facts about monarch migrations. We also read another beautiful book about monarch migrations called "hurry and the monarch" by Antoine O. Flatharta. It is the story of a texas tortoise named hurry as he watches the transformation of a monarch caterpillar to butterfly. The monarch introduces hurry to life beyond his garden and in the process hurry learns all about her life and her migration. Beautiful watercolor drawings.