minne{BAKER}: Butterfly Birthday

I've been friends with this girl since the 1st grade. This is my friend, Krystle, and me at her bachelorette party over 5 years ago. Now she has two adorable daughters - I can hardly believe it (we can't possibly be old enough for that...)! We've known each other most of our lives and it was really fun to get to make cakes for her younger daughter's first birthday party last weekend.

When Krystle asked me to make the cakes she gave me two words: "purple" and "butterflies." I spent the next couple weeks "researching" (Googling) ideas for the cakes. On Pinterest I found these adorable chocolate butterfly cupcake toppers and knew instantly that I had to use them. There is a great full tutorial on that site but here are a few photos I took.

I decided not to do butterflies on all of the cupcakes to have a little variety. For the other ones, I pulled out some tricks I learned in my Wilton Flowers & Cake Design class. I made a bunch of these little flowers in purple and white.

Don't they look {super} cute on the cupcakes? I love them.

So after I finished all the cupcakes I frosted the 6-inch topper cake in purple frosting. After I got it frosted I was stumped. I stared at the cake for over an hour holding up flowers here and there... some butterflies... the '1' candle... Finally I came up with this.

Then I added the borders on the top and bottom of the cake and added some more flowers.

Then I realized the birthday girl's name should be on her cake! Duh! I remembered these adorable cupcakes by Sweetopia and made these letters for the cake with some left over royal icing and sanding sugar.

I let them sit overnight (as well as a second, identical set in case of breakage) and placed them on the cake in the morning.

Here's the topper cake all put together:

And the cupcakes:

I also used the die cut machines at Archiver's to make this matching banner. It's hard to tell with the sunlight behind, but the letters are all in different purple, pattered paper: