Butterfly Birthday Cake

Today I decided to try and make my first birthday cake and what else should I try but a butterfly (I love butterflies). I saw this design from a very useful website which can be found here...

This is a very simple idea but very effective. Firstly I made a round cake using a normal sponge cake recipe:

100g Butter

100g Sugar

100g Flour

3 eggs

Then cooked this as normal and left it to cool.

The cooled cake ready to cut... 

Once cool I then cut the cake in half with a large bread knife. Then I got out the tape measure in an attempt to make the next part fairly symmetrical. At this point I realised that my cake was smaller than the recommended 9 inches (I have no idea how big that is as a complete cms person but I didn't think it really mattered). So I made up how big I thought looked right for the next bit. In the bottom half of the cake you need to cut a diamond shape out. mine was around 1.5inches along each side.

Remove the diamond and swap the halves of the cake so they're round side to round side.

Cake is cut in half and diamond shape is cut out the middle

The cake is now ready to decorate..

Cakes are placed round side to round side and is ready to decorate

To decorate the top of the cake I made some buttercream, recipe of Jo Wheatley...

125g Butter

500g Icing sugar

3tbsp of milk

Whipped this up so it was light and creamy. 

First batch of icing I used I coloured purple with the gel colours. It took slightly more colour than I expected but they're remarkably easy to use so was quite pleased. 

Buttercream with a few dots of colouring 

I just placed this icing on the top of the cake and carefully spread it about the cake to form the base layer. 

Iced the basics. 

Once this was complete I then wanted to decide what to pipe using my new kit. I thought I'd start it simply and use a small nozzle to pipe an edging, if it went terribly wrong then I would be able to turn them into squiggles. I made up a small batch of icing using the blue colour and placed this in a piping bag. Trying to work out how the nozzle attached and then put it all together. 

Hard at work attempting piping for the first time

Fortunately it turned out rather well and I was thrilled with my first ever efforts at piping. It was very easy to do but I do need a slightly steadier hand if I want to create better lines. Since I'd done so well with the edging I then extended this to make a body and antenni.. Am rather chuffed with my end result....

Rather pleased with my piping efforts

And to finish up I added a few sweets and touches. If I was to make this again I would probably try and pipe some different colours on there but for today I wanted to keep it quite basic. 

The finished product