Flutter Cups

I love my kids... I say that with utmost sincerity and just a leeeeetle bit of eye twitching. But can someone, for the love of Pete, please explain to me why they want the biggest, most overly decorated, cardboard-flavored and frosted with 10 pounds of sugar, most expensive birthday cake they can find? For the boys, it was Transformers, for the girls it was Disney Princesses or Tinkerbell. Not that there's anything wrong with any of them, but stick a plastic robot or a dancing princess on top of a cake, slap it with a logo, and the price suddenly goes up twenty bucks. I'd just like my kids to have a little more integrity, people... and a cheaper outlook on life wouldn't hurt.

In any case, that's how I came up with these little beauties for my daughter Shay's 3rd birthday. They were sparkly, they were cute, and best of all, they were cheap! She loved them, and so did I. The stenciling was a bit time consuming, but it was well worth it. 24 Flutter Cups cost me around 10 bucks, and her eyes lit up like Christmas morning when she saw them.

WARNING~ They are -almost- too pretty to eat! :-)



Flutter Cups

 

 

Materials:

1 box of your favorite cake mix (I used Duncan Hines Devil Food Moist Deluxe, my personal fave)

1 tub of your favorite icing ( Duncan Hines, again, whipped cream cheese)

1 bag white chocolate chips

Vegetable oil

Colored sugar

Wax paper

Butterfly wing templates

 

 

Directions:

Make the cake mix according to the box directions. Fill cupcake liners 2/3 full and bake accordingly. While the cupcakes are baking, grab your waxpaper and cut one six inch square per cupcake.

 

As for the templates, I used these, which can be found here:

http://familyfun.go.com/assets/cms/pdf/recipes/FF0511TOTM_ButterflyWings.pdf

Mix one cup of the chocolate chips with 1/4 teaspoon of vegetable oil in a glass bowl or measuring cup. Melt in the microwave in ten second intervals, stirring between each cycle, until the chocolate is smooth. Pour it into a pastry bag or a ziploc bag with a small corner snipped off, which is what I did. You may have to experiment with how big a hole to make, as you want the line of chocolate to be thin but not easily breakable. If you use a pastry bag, I'd recomend a fairly small tip.

 

Let the chocolate sit a bit, until it's less runny, but still easy to squeeze out. Grap a wax paper square and lay it over your chosen template. Pipe the chocolate out, tracing along the design, like this!

 

 

 

Now, before the chocolate hardens, quickly cover it with your sugar. I did experiment with this a little, and I found that the finer sugars work better than sprinkles or coarser grained sugars. In any case, this is what it should look like:

 

 

 

Now it's just a matter of letting the chocolate cool. It will harden and easily peel off the wax paper!

 

Hopefully, you didn't forget the cupcakes. :p Once they've been frosted, you can add the wings. I found that if you cut two small slits in the tops of the cupcakes, you can sort of push the wings in a bit to help them sit up. Here's the end result...

 

 

 

P.S. The original recipe called for jelly beans for the body... I didn't have any on hand, so I just melted milk chocolate chips the same way as the white ones and piped out little bodies. And the rainbow sugar on this one was actually just me taking all the leftover sugar from the solid color wings and mixing it together... :p

 

Hope you like them!