Recipe | Chocolate Butterfly Cakes

These are cute, delicious and easy to make! Growing up we called them “butterfly buns” but today I guess they’d be “cupcakes”?

These are a variation on other butterfly cake recipes I’ve featured. Scroll down to the bottom of this post for links to those!

Ingredients (makes 12 cupcakes)

150 g butter/margarine
150 g self-raising flour
150 g caster sugar
3 eggs (medium)
3 level teaspoons baking powder
25 g cocoa powder

For the buttercream:

75 g butter/margarine and 150 g icing sugar

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees centigrade. Put 12 cupcake cases into your tray.

Cream together the butter and sugar then add the eggs. Beat until the mixture is smooth.

Sift in the flour, cocoa powder and baking powder and mix until well combined.

Put a dessertspoonful of the mixture into each case. Bake in the oven for about 2o minutes or until they’ve risen and are slightly springy to the touch. If you stick a sharp knife into one it should come out clean.

Leave to cool. Meanwhile make the buttercream by beating the icing sugar and margarine/butter to form a smooth paste.

To make the “butterflies”: saw the top off each cake using a sharp knife.

Cut the circles of cake you have cut off down the middle to give you two “wings”. Pipe or spoon your buttercream into the top of the cupcakes. Stick the wings to the cupcake.

I added some chocolate sprinkles and multi-coloured sugar sprinkles down the “body” of the butterflies. Finally, using a tea strainer as a mini-sieve, I dusted the cupcakes with icing sugar.

Sorry for not having many pictures this week. By way of compensation, below is a picture of my most recent baking fail. I was trying to decorate cupcakes to make them look like sheep (if you Google this, you’ll get an idea of what I was going for). Unfortunately the finished product looked nothing like sheep – my niece suggested they were more like white lions! Personally, I thought one of them looked a little like Hitler (this is still making me chuckle, but then I’m easily amused).