Butterfly Cupcakes

It's been a few weeks, but before I forget altogether, I thought I'd share the cupcakes I made for Little Girl's birthday.

She wanted chocolate cupcakes with pink icing.  Thankfully she is not yet Americanized enough to request a theme beyond that!

I was really tempted to order her cupcakes from a bakery because we'd been so busy, but I also like to have cake to offer the parents at the party, so getting the number needed plus extras to be sure I had enough started to add up the price.  And ever since Africa took hold of our hearts, and children living in poverty, children dying of poverty, there are just many things I have a hard time spending money on these days, especially when I could just put in a little work and make cupcakes for a fraction of the cost of the bakery ones.


But, I wanted the cupcakes to be cute and had a hard time figuring out what to do to make them more special than just icing and sprinkles. 

Finally I got a great idea for decorating the cupcakes here.  And it happened to go perfectly with the theme I'd gone with for the goody bags because it was what I happened to find at the Dollar Store  - butterflies!

These turned out pretty cute and were yummy, too -- I'm a sucker for sweet and salty so the mixture of chocolate, icing and candy, with pretzels thrown in was really good!

The pretzels are store-bought white chocolate coated pretzels, then blue icing is piped down the body of the butterfly, a raspberry m&m is the head, and I couldn't find thin enough licorice for the antennae, so that is made from some candy fruit rope stuff I found and then cut into short strips.

And I say it again, HOW did people mother before The Internet?  Really!  No way could I have thought up those cupcakes on my own, but copy someone else's idea?  Yeah, I can do that!