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Motivated

Perhaps this doesn´t happen to you, but it does to me.  There are times when my creativity runs off the charts.  And these last few days have been filled with doing things that are inspired.  Miss M has been the general muse, but not solely responsible for this rash of activity.

First, remember the pathetic example of a butterfly cake I made for Miss M´s second birthday.  If not, click here.  I wanted to do better and found an answer in a local thrift shop.  I stop by this shop about once every couple of weeks looking for a cashmere sweater I can take apart, spin into a thicker ply and recycle for a nice quality scarf or shawl.  So far I have not been lucky enough to find one.  But I keep going back anyway.  While there last week I found this:



It is a Stronglite butterfly cake pan, obviously used due to the dents, but for $1.99, I splurged.  On Thursday the Knit Night group was here and it was the perfect time to check out if I could make a decent butterfly.  There was a time when I did a lot of cake decorating and using food colouring and piping tips was second nature to me.  But when the house became just Paul and me the practicing necessary to maintain these skills was diminished because we should not eat all the calories contained in an entire cake.

This was what I was going for in the colour palate from Great Birthday Party Ideas


I made a two layer cake using a one-half recipe for a 9 X 13 cake.  The recipe was lemon and I threw in some blueberries dried last fall.  The yellow colour of the cake and the blueberries inspired the colour palate for the frosting.  I used violet to dye my lemon-flavoured frosting and reserved some of the creamy white frosting to make a lighter violet.  However, I put in way too much colour paste to dye the first batch of frosting so when the additional white was added it too became very dark.  (If you look very closely at the photo you can see a very slight tonal difference in the stars containing the candies and the rest of the cake.)

Anyway, with a star tip I filled in the top of the butterfly cake and added some miniature M&Ms in yellow as decorations; a bit of whole wheat spaghetti was used for the antennae.  And viola, this is how my butterfly cake looked.


IMHO it is a vast improvement over the November attempt and much to my shock the cake and frosting tasted far better than I expected.  The blueberries did moisten up to a nice consistency and did not bleed into the yellow cake.  All in all I was pleased with the results.  It might take a bit more practice, but I am getting close to perfecting the butterfly.  And the best part, three of us had a piece of the cake on Thursday and the rest went home with a knit buddy, Dana, who has kids who would enjoy the treat and also burn off the extra calories far better than Paul and me.

Miss M also inspired my other creation which will be discussed in the next post.


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