1970s Retro Caterpillar and Butterfly Cake Ideas

The cake decorating TV shows with all the fondant and special equipment are fun to watch. And not just because you are hoping for something to go seriously wrong. It’s a true art and skill that takes practice and an artistic vision. But that style of competitive cake decorating wasn’t mainstream until around 2005. That doesn’t mean there weren’t artistic cakes before then. There was the Wilton Decorating book, of course, using pastry bags and tips to make beautiful things. But there were also fun cakes anyone with basic baking skills could make, involving little more than boxed cake mix, boxed frosting mix, creative cutting and some candy to decorate. These 1977 caterpillar and butterfly cake ideas from Mattel Preschool are exactly that kind of simple but fun cake.

Many basic cookbooks as well as Baker’s Coconut cookbooklets had ideas for cutting sheet or round cakes into different shapes, and assembling the cut pieces into a something new, like Tangrams. I’m not exactly sure how Mattel Preschool got into the baking game, but among a set of 5 cards found in a vintage cookbook were a very buggy pair of caterpillar and butterfly cake ideas. The edges of the cards are perforated; perhaps they came in a magazine or with a toy.

Both call for using boxed cake, which is fine, but baking from scratch would also be lovely. These recipes aren’t so much for how to bake a cake as they are for how to cut one up to make cool shapes.

The caterpillar cake with its little candy corn toothies is adorable. Mattel’s example has peanut butter and jelly frosting, but it could be any flavor. All you do is bake two 9″round cakes, stack them with filling in the middle, cut them into quarters and set up on a platter or fancied up cardboard.

The suggested decorations are pretty basic, imagine the patterns you could make with an assortment of candy. Pocky sticks would make excellent edible antennae. And we can all agree it’s possible to do better than chocolate kisses on the side of the head for the eyes.

The butterfly cake, which, as nature dictates, comes after the caterpillar, is also easy to assemble. The hardest part of the whole thing would be cutting a through the shoestring licorice at serving time and convincing other humans to eat it. (I love licorice, but I believe that to be a minority opinion.) Perhaps a pre-packed tube of decorator icing would be a better choice. For eyes, sugar googly eyes, which were not available in supermarkets in the 1970s, would be outstanding.

This is another situation where candy could be used to make some nice patterns on the wings, although simple is never a bad choice.

Do these caterpillar and butterfly cake ideas bring back fond memories of a special made at home cake from your youth? Perhaps something from one of the Betty Crocker cookbooks for kids? Share your memory in the comments.