BUTTERFLIES FROM FLOWER CUTTERS

And once again here's the six-petaled flower we love to use! One time when Jill and I were making flowers and butterfly cookies and I was talking about Sugarbelle and how she is a wizard at turning cookie cutters into something else - Jill took some of the flower cookies we'd baked and turned them into butterflies - perfect! Good job, Jill! 

Other butterflies we've made can be found here.

- posted by Momsu

TWO HEARTS MAKE A BUTTERFLY

What if you want to make butterfly cookies and you don't have a butterfly cutter? Or you don't have the right size and shape?

Cut two hearts out of dough just the same. 

Cut the points off at an angle.  

Put them together and bake.

And you have a butterfly! 

Now decorate - that's the fun part! 

I discovered the shape of the heart and the angle of the cut can make a big difference in the look of the butterfly. 

Long hearts will make a very wide butterfly. 

Two wide hearts make a classic shape.

Short fat hearts will make a more compact one.

Butterflies come in all sizes and shapes - just like cookies!

  

- posted by Momsu

WHITE BUTTERFLIES

When Jill went home after we decorated butterflies on Mother's Day I still had cookies to decorate and no time to do it. I tossed out all of the colored icing we had used to make butterflies but still had some uncolored (white) icing in the refrigerator. I think I was grumbling about mixing up colors when Jill suggested I make white butterflies and I decided that was a very good idea. Mixing the colors and getting the consistency right to ice cookies is not my favorite part. Jill wanted me to make butterflies that look like the white-on-white ginger snowflakes I make every Christmas. Those are easy and very pretty I think.

I tried decorating the big fancy butterfly we hadn't attempted and although I think it has the potential for being truly beautiful I can't control the piping on a cookie that big. I'd better stick to smaller ones. I like the way the shape of the wings on this smaller one turned out.

I think white butterfly cookies would be a pretty favor for a June wedding!

- posted by Momsu

MORE BUTTERFLIES

Jill came for Mother's Day weekend and we decorated butterfly cookies. It's MUCH more fun to do it together. She brought a beautiful big copper butterfly cutter and I made ginger and sugar cookies with it and my big Nut Tree butterfly cutter - determined to do a better job with a large cookie this time but didn't get that far.

I also made smaller butterflies with my simple Wilton cutter

and a new swallowtail cutter that quickly became our favorite. Jill put dots on the tails - I like that.

The bigger cookies are still sitting there getting stale a week later. 

What I learned: Make the butterfly body first - it's hard to fit a body between two wings which sometimes end up too far apart. And - it's hard to decorate cookies when it's very hot and dry. 

- posted by Momsu

Nina says: These are so pretty! I wish I had been there to decorate with you. I love the new swallowtail cookie cutter!

BUTTERFLIES by Nina

 

I was inspired by Momsu's butterfly cookie post and decorated some butterflies, too.

I made this one last year but wanted to use more color and Momsu's technique of outlining the wings first.

I made a few with multicolored outlines.

And a couple with black outlines.

I also made these small, simple butterfly cookies but the detail gets lost on the ginger cookie background. I might try these again on a sugar cookie, maybe with a little bit of embellishment on the wings.

Some butterflies and flowers for a spring birthday.

Happy Spring!

A BUTTERFLY

A butterfly is so fragile and beautiful - I think it's hard to translate one into a cookie. If you research butterflies the design possibilities are endless. I have a big butterfly in my Nut Tree cookie cutter collection that I've tried in the past to make into a cookie but haven't been happy with the way it turned out. Last year I found a smaller butterfly cutter and tried again with better results.

I did a scan of the cutter

 and removed the background in Photoshop.

Then I filled the shape with gingerbread brown using the draw tools in MS Publisher. There are many more sophisticated programs you can use to do this but I've been using Publisher for so long it's easier and faster for me.

I decorated the shape using the draw and color tools thinking in terms of what I could do with frosting.

And finally I decorated the cookie. It's fun and sometimes it translates well and sometimes it doesn't. There are usually some changes to the final design.

I like to keep my cookies simple - not too much going on. If you decorate on wet icing it helps to keep the look fragile. I waited too long to make the final dots and they didn't smooth out. 

Soon I'll try Butterflies again.

- posted by Momsu