Butterfly Cake How-To

Last weekend was my daughter's birthday. Since she has inherited my indecisiveness (so I'm told by family members!) I didn't know what kind of cake, decorations, or even what presents she wanted until the day before! Her party was on Saturday, and on Friday night she finally informed me that she wanted a butterfly birthday cake. I don't happen to have a butterfly-shaped cake pan laying around anywhere - so I considered driving up to the public library north of us where they have a zillion cake pans you can check out. But what if there was no butterfly? That would be about a 40-minute round trip ride for nothing. Sooo....I came up with a genius idea.

After mixing up the cake, I used my heart-shaped cake pan to make two layers:

Then, I cut the pointed ends off the hearts about 2-3 inches in from the edge:

Put the straight edges together:

I made the butterfly head out of one of the remaining scrap pieces - the shape was a little off, but frosting does wonders for that!

And...the finished cake (no there wasn't really a big blank space on half of it. That's just me being private...Insert any little girl's name of your choice in the big pink space!) :)

We did a little decorating too (like I said, everything was last minute!) Here are some pics of balloons & tissue paper flowers that my BFF's made for her:

The little spots on the bottoms of the balloons are actually marbles. This makes them hang straight down - it looks really cool!

And we had a few of these lovely tissue-paper flowers:

Not bad for a last-minute party, if I do say so myself!