Football Cupcakes

In honor of this years Super Bowl, I made some football shaped, and decorated, cupcakes. During the process of making these, they really didn't seem like they would shape out right, but they did! I'm quite pleased with the outcome.

What You Need

Ingredients:

Cupcake Mix of any flavor (you can make your own if you are talented in the kitchen)
Chocolate Frosting (or take your favorite frosting and make it brown)
White Decorating Frosting (I used the canned one shown, which was fun, but difficult to control)

Supplies:

Cupcake Tin
Aluminum Foil
Cupcake Liners
Big Spoon

Prepare Your Liners

We are going to shape our liners so they are more like footballs.

Fold up the sides a bit so the bottom of the liner is now oblong. (Picture 2 and 3)

Now fold the sides in so that the top of the liner will be more flat, you will notice after step one that it now fans out too much. I did 2 folds on each side to keep it all even. (Pictures 4-7)

Prepare Your Aluminum Foil

I went about getting my aluminum foil ready in a certain way, but it doesn't have to be as step by step as it is here.

Pull out a sheet about 3 or 4 inches and tear it off. (Picture 2)
Fold it in half. (Pictures 3-6)
Keep folding it until you have a piece only about an inch tall. You don't want them to stick up too much when you put them in the tin with the liners. (Picture 7)
Make 2 for each cupcake. (Picture 8)

I folded in the sides to try to make it thicker on the ends of the aluminum foil piece and thinner in the middle to help with the football shaping. Also, don't flatten them; it defeats the purpose if they are too flat to shape the cupcakes. I left mine with some fluff to them and then flattened them as needed once they were in the tin with the liners.

This step and step 2 take some time, so you might what to get these all ready before you mix up your cupcakes. I used the same aluminum foil pieces over and over so you only really need enough for one muffin tins worth.

Line Your Tin

Now it is time to prepare your tin.

Put in the liner you have prepared. (Picture 1)
Put in one of the tin foils on one of the sides, I found that it was good to pinch tight the bottom of the piece of aluminum foil but leave the top a bit loose, it helps it sit in the tin with the liner better. (Picture 2)
Put in the other side and try to flatten the whole thing a bit making sure the liner is staying in the tin. (Picture 3 and 4)
Do this for each cupcake hole. (Picture 5)
Prepare your mix. (Picture 6)
Put it in your liners, if they weren't staying down well before, they will once you put in the mixture, use a big spoon and spoon it in, I made it so they wouldn't overflow, but you want them to rise about right to the top, about 3/4 full should do it. (Picture 7 and 8)
Bake!

Look at Your Football Cupcakes

Look at those footballs. You can use your first batch to decide which aluminum foil shapes worked the best. For one (the top left) I actually just used two folded up squares and that worked out decently. So if you don't have a lot of time, just fold up some squares to stick on the sides.

Put them on a rack to cool before you attack them with frosting. I've wreaked many a cupcake being too impatient to put on the frosting.

Decorate Aka Attack With Frosting!

So the decorating is pretty basic. Spread a nice coat of your chocolat frosting on your football. Next, take your white decorating frosting and add on your laces and that lovely white strip footballs have on each end. Done! So easy to do, isn't it? I'm not an artist, and like I said in step 1, that decorating frosting just wanted to come out of that can, so it kind of got messy on my footballs. (But they taste the same if they are beautiful or not.)

Pictures 6 and 7 show my football cupcakes next to a normal one so you can see they really are football shaped, it isn't a trick of the camera. Just in case people were wondering :)

Eat :)

Eat that football!

It stands up pretty well considering it's shape. (until you get to the end of eating it, then it falls over, but cupcakes tend to do that)