Pear butterfly cupcakes

One of my very dear friends gave me a cupcake book about 10 years ago, and I’m ashamed to say I haven’t made anything from it.

I’ve read it a lot and the pictures are beautiful, but I’ve never given anything a go. It’s an overlooked book in my collection.

Of course this needs to be put right so I picked the prettiest cakes and made them. They are pear butterfly cakes.

They’re supposed to have pecans in them but they don’t because I didn’t have any and used walnuts instead, and they’re supposed to have maple syrup in but they don’t because I didn’t have any and used golden syrup instead. Hey, you’ve got to work with what you’ve got!

The cakes came out of the oven fine; I purposely filled them lower than I normally would because of how the icing is supposed to sit, but I still had to chop a few of the tops off.

For the icing, as per the instructions, I melted 500g of fondant icing, mixed in an egg white and left it to set for 10 minutes before splitting the mixture into 3 and making some pretty colours. I still don’t feel right about putting egg white in icing to be honest.

Lesson 1: melting fondant takes 700 years.

Lesson 2: once you’ve waited 700 years to melt it, it turns solid again in about 4 seconds. This is very frustrating.

Making the pear butterflies was a bit tricky to be honest. You have to boil up some sugar and water, coat some pear slices in it and then dry them in the oven for 40 minutes before you shape them into wings and let them cool.

They didn’t really turn out as well as I’d hoped, but I used up 2 pears and didn’t seem to get it right so I’ve made do.

This is a very ‘making do with what you’ve got’ recipe isn’t it?

Anyway, here are the final cakes. I guess they look ok. They don’t look as good as they do in the book, but nothing I make looks as good as it does in the book.

I think if I were to make these again, I’d do some things differently:

1. Take them out of the oven sooner
2. Make the icing differently (no egg white thank you very much; I think I would just make the icing with icing sugar and water)
3. Figure out a different way of doing the butterflies – perhaps slicing them with a mandolin would work? I used a peeler (too thin) and then tried a knife (too thick)

Anyway, thanks for reading and if you have any tips about pear butterflies then please let me know in the comments!

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