Butterfly Birthday Cake

5 from 1 vote

Here is an easy butterfly birthday cake carved and shaped out of a sheet cake and decorated into a lovely, girly butterfly themed cake design.

Prep Time30

Cook Time50

Decorating time2

Total Time3 20

Course: Dessert

Cuisine: American

Servings: 6 inches by 10 inches butterfly shaped cake

Calories: 9521.9kcal

Preheat oven to 170 °Celsius.
Beat butter and sugar till soft and creamy for about 2 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking powder, and salt. Fold in the sifted ingredients into the creamed mixture alternately with milk, starting and ending with flour.
Finally, add in vanilla extract and combine well. Pour batter into two greased and floured cake pans (6 inches by 10 inches rectangle pans) and bake for 45 to 50 minutes until the top of the cakes spring back when lightly pressed. The cakes are done when a skewer inserted in the center of the cakes comes out without any wet batter.
Remove cakes from oven and let them cool completely before icing and decorating.

Draw the butterfly template by hand. For consistent sizing of the wings, fold your paper into 2 and draw half of the butterfly. Still keeping the paper folded, cut the butterfly following the outline and then open up the fold. This way, you will get both sides of the wings and body is the exact same shape and size (see Note 1).

Once the cakes have completely cooled down, level the tops and sandwiched both with buttercream. And then, using the prepared butterfly cake template, carve the cake to make a butterfly shaped cake.
Place the carved cake on a cake board, and crumb coat it with a thin layer of buttercream.

Roll out some white fondant to about ⅛ inch thick and again, using the same butterfly template used to cut the cake, cut out the butterfly shape. Dust the cut fondant with powdered sugar and loosely roll it into a long rolling pin. This way, you can avoid the fondant form stretching and loosing its shape as you are lifting it.
Gently unroll the fondant piece onto the buttercream crumb coated cake and position it to fit onto the butterfly shaped cake.
If there is excess fondant on the sides, use a sharp knife to trim it off. If for some reasons the fondant piece is smaller than the cake, you can stretch it gently to cover the top of the cake entirely.

Next is the sides of the butterfly birthday cake. For this, use the star tip and white royal icing for the vertical lines of icing, all around the cake.

Tint the royal icing in red, blue, yellow, and green. Start with the outlines in yellow. Use a round piping tip and make medium-sized dots all around the butterfly border.
Next are the red and green dotted lines for the upper and lower wings. Again, use a round piping tip and make the medium-sized dots, following the shape formed by the yellow dots earlier as close as possible.

Pipe the butterfly body on the butterfly themed birthday cake. Use a round tip, pipe the outline, and then fill the inside with black icing in horizontal lines. Using the same black icing, make two antennae for the butterfly on the cake board.
After that, complete the rest of the butterfly wing design, piping the outlines first and then filling the insides. Finally, pipe 2 yellow dots on the head for the eyes.

If you are not into drawing, you can get a butterfly template from your child's coloring books or simply get a template from the internet. Search for 'butterfly coloring pages' and you will find lots of pretty templates you can use for your cake. Do remember to resize the template to fit your cake before printing. Learn how to resize your templates with my easy tutorial here.