Butterfly Buns (serves 12)

Unfortunately I didn't manage to make my '2 blogs a week' last week (which is disheartening for me, at least) but I promise to give you 3 blogs this week, you lucky people. This blog's all about the butterfly buns that I made for my friend Eliza's charity function at a local community centre. It all went extremely well on the day and through the baking stall, selling tea and coffee as well as various other things like a raffle she managed to raise over £400 with more still to come! Personally I found this fantastic. From a relatively small coffee morning I had not expected to get that much at all.
So once the donations have stopped coming the money will be split in half with half of it going to the Sophie Lancaster Foundation (Sophie, pictured on the left) and the other half going to the Price Of Wales Hospice, two very good places. 'Tis all I have to say about that really, so I'll let you get on with reading about the recipe!

Difficulty: **

Pros
Easy to make
Classic and tasty

Cons
Buttercream can have a varying consistency

Ingredients (fills roughly 12 butterfly buns)
75g Margerine
175g Icing Sugar
1 tsp Vanilla Essence

Method
1) Soften the butter in the bowl.
NOTE: this makes it easier to stir the icing sugar in.

2) Add the vanilla essence.

3) Sieve the icing sugar into the bowl in small amounts, stirring between each sieving until a smooth consistency is reached.

4) Using a sharp knife, cut the tops off of your buns however you prefer. Then cut the pieces in half, these will be the butterfly's wings.

5) Using a spoon or a piping bag, put about a heaped teaspoon of buttercream onto the bun.

6) Place the cut off pieces into the buttercream in a way that they stand up like wings (refer to the pictures if you are unsure how to do this)

Another suggestion: Instead of buttercream you could just use whipped cream. Simply take a carton of double or whipping cream, whip it until it forms stiff peaks and pipe/spoon on as you require!

That's pretty much all you need to know for making butterfly buns, they're quite simple but very nice to have once in a while. If the amount of buttercream is too little or too much for you then you can alter it however you please!
My final sidenote for people that want to make the chocolate buns pictured, all you have to do is replace 50g of Self Raising flour with 50g of Cocoa Powder when making normal buns.
So you'd put 100g of Self Raising flour into the bowl with 50g of Cocoa Powder.
I hope you enjoyed this post guys, I'll be putting up another one about buns I've made for teachers and leaving day next!