This cake has a blue butterfly design that’s made from edible wafer paper. It would be cute for a baby shower or a birthday cake, and it’s easy to DIY it with some basic supplies.
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Make a flower with the butterflies.
To create this design, I made a flower out of the wafer paper butterflies, then attached more butterflies to the cake in a pattern coming out of the flower to make it look like they’re flying up onto the cake.
Wafer paper is edible but not sweet, and you can use it on its own or with edible glue to make flowers or to stick to cookies. For this flower, I used butterflies instead of wafer paper petals, but I made the flower the same way that you’d make a wafer paper or gumpaste rose.
Start with a small styrofoam ball on a wooden skewer or wire and stick the butterflies to the ball the same way that you’d attach the rose petals. This article shows how to make a wafer paper rose if you need some tips: How to make a wafer paper rose
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Insert the flower into the bottom tier of the cake to act as the focal point of your design.
For more butterfly cakes that you can make at home, click here.
Add the blue butterflies to the cake.
To attach wafer paper to a cake, all you have to do is press them onto the buttercream. As long as the icing is a little sticky, it will attach to the cake without anything extra being done.
If the icing is crusted over, you might need to rough it up a little with a spatula where you’re attaching the butterfly, or use a little corn syrup on the butterfly.
Start attaching some large butterflies around the flower like they’re spreading out from it. Put more on one side to start shaping the cascade.
For this look, you want there to be more butterflies at the base where the flower sits, then they should spread out as they “fly” upward.
Add some smaller butterflies above the first ones, and shape the placement so that it looks like it’s coming up off of the flower and around the tier.
Scatter them out as you get to the top tiers so that it looks like they’re flying away from each other as they fly up.
Add some smaller butterflies at the top and place some on the top of the cake. If you’re using an additional topper, you can put that in then attach some butterflies to itusing piping gel or corn syrup.
This cake is a nice one for a boy’s baby shower cake, and the butterfly flower is an interesting feature that people will notice after looking at it but not necessarily from a distance.
It looks like a rose at first, but the butterflies gives it a twist that people won’t expect to see!
This is a great design for a blue butterfly baby shower cake, or you could also use it for a birthday cake or an event like a graduation.
Wafer paper information.
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Wafer paper is made from potato starch, water, and vegetable oil. It’s gluten-free and vegan, and some brands are kosher.
Unless there’s cross-contamination in the kitchen it should be nut-free, but you should always check with the person who sells them if you have a severe food allergy of any type!
Wafer paper is edible, but it isn’t sweet, so it doesn’t taste like very much. You can stick it directly to buttercream without any extra edible glue, or you can attach it to fondant with piping gel or corn syrup.
The best example of wafer paper that I have is the wafer layer on torrone candy. That’s basically wafer paper, so if you’ve ever had torrone, you’ve eaten wafer paper.
Another example is the wafer sandwich cookies that are rectangular and that have a diamond shape on the cookie parts. That’s a type of wafer paper, but it’s not exactly the same thing.
Some people don’t like to eat wafer paper because it’s starchy when you chew or bite it, but you can remove it before you eat the cake. For these butterflies, I would definitely take the butterflies off of the cake before eating it, but that’s easy to do.
Wafer paper is a good choice for cake decorations because it’s lightweight, it doesn’t take as long as gumpaste does to dry, and it sticks to buttercream really easily. The only thing that will really damage it is moisture, because it will shrivel up if it gets wet or absorbs humidity.
As long as you have dry hands when you work with it, it’s not difficult to learn how to use it.
Be careful when you refrigerate wafer paper…Read this article about that to see if you need to handle it in a specific way.
This cake design is really easy to do, and it’s something that looks harder than it is, so you’ll impress people with your skills!
