I was feeling a tad nostalgic for my childhood the other day and in preparation for a new Mental Health Swims session (now available at Bassenthwaite Lake), I thought I would whip up a batch of Butterfly Cakes to take.
Maybe I’m on my own on this one, but I miss the taste sensation of the Butterfly Cake. Traditionally smaller than the, now very popular American-style cupcake, the Butterfly Cake offers that bitesize hit with its nice and delicate balance between the sponge and butter icing. Cupcakes on the other hand, with an equal ratio of icing to sponge, generally make me feel like I’m on a trip like Bart and Milhouse when they have some serious Squishee.
For this recipe, I worked off the principle that my Mum taught me for a decent basic sponge mixture. I call it the 4’s. Four ingredients, 4 ounces (113g) of each.
Ingredients:
113g Self Raising Flour
113g Granulated (or brown… it’s up to you) sugar
113g Butter
2 eggs (which should be the equivalent of 113g)
Butter Icing Ingredients:
100g icing sugar
50g softened butter
(Optional) Vanilla extract
Instructions:
- Turn your oven to 190 degrees
- Weigh out your butter and sugar into a bowl and then mix until it’s creamed together. You know… when it’s tempting to have a lick of the spoon…
- Add in your eggs and mix. For mixing you can use an electric whisk. This is time efficient, but if you have some thoughts you want to battle through and take out on the mixture, get that wooden spoon out and go to town until your mixture is airy and light.
- Now for the flour. I don’t tend to sieve any more, but you are more than welcome to do so. This is also when, if you want, to add your splosh (technical term for a couple of drops) of vanilla essence, or any flavouring you would like to add.
- Mix all together until your mixture is smooth and well aerated.
- Now after all that about cupcake sizes… I looked in my cupboard only to find a cupcake tin instead of a fairy cake one. So I ended up making Butterfly XL. This mixture made 8 large cupcake-sized cakes. But with a correct-sized butterfly cake tin, you could double that. Grease up the tin and pop the mixture in.
- Into the oven, they go for around 15 minutes. Check on them from around the 12-minute mark. They may need to be moved around the oven, just to make an evenly baked batch. When you do take them out, the tops should be firm but bouncy. If you want to double-check, get your BBQ steel skewer and give it a poke in the middle. If the skewer comes out clean you are good to take them out of the oven. If not, then leave the batch in the oven for a touch longer.
- Once out of the oven, you need to leave them to cool. At this stage, my impatience usually gets the better of me. Leave them to cool completely. If you try to work them now, with the icing, it will all just melt and it won't work. I left mine to cool over night.
- Now cooled, you can get to work on the butter icing. As mentioned earlier, you don’t need an equal ratio of cake to icing to make a delicious post-swim treat. This batch only needs 100g icing sugar (for this, absolutely sieve it out - makes your life much easier) and 50g of room temperature butter (if the butter is really cold, again, it won't make your butter-icing-making-life easier).
- Once your sieved the icing sugar and added your room-temperature butter in to a bowl, give it a few drops of boiling water. The boiling water helps kick off the mixing. Get that wooden spoon and start beating it. It can be tiring but doing it by spoon is better, and the sense of achievement at the end is pretty strong. You can also add some drops of vanilla extract now if you want.
- Take your cooled sponges and with a knife, at an angle, cut into the tops and make a circle. Remove the top and cut that in two. Put to one side.
- Now this is where the real creativity comes in and it's up to you what you do. For me, I added a dollop of homemade and grown rhubarb and ginger jam, before adding some butter-icing and then the ‘wings’. As you can see from the pictures, I forgot to angle the wings so it looks more like a mini Victorian sponge cake. But hey… I got “delicious” as a reaction so I’m not complaining.
I really enjoyed making these cakes. Having a wander down memory lane can be a good thing. Childhood memories make me think of how little the world affected me back then. I’m not saying we should all regress to our childhoods. But maybe we need to just be reminded from time to time, of the little joys that we experienced as a child. Like going to a party and enjoying a butterfly cake before pinning the tail on the donkey or laughing with excitement when the music stops at musical chairs. That reset and childlike joy is what I get whenever I enter the cold water. It's that joy, and when you experience it with others and then allow yourself to talk, the world doesn’t seem that unmanageable anymore. Because, look at you! You can enter cold water, you can accomplish anything.
Need snacks-piration? Check out our other recipes, or get in touch and tell us what snacks you like to take on your swims!
