Loyalty.
Loyalty means you remain faithful to your team in the face of crippling disappointment. It means you stick by your team even when you live in enemy territory. And it means YOU DON'T MAKE DESSERTS FOR OTHER FOOTBALL TEAMS. NO.
I have my integrity to think about, as well as my honor and my family. What would my dad or my stepmom or my aunt and uncle think if I made some ridiculous Eagles cake? Or drizzled my cupcakes with the tears of Tom Brady? Do you honestly think I'd still be invited to holidays & s**t? No. No I wouldn't, and with good reason.
Speaking of Tom Brady, take a moment to watch one of my favorite videos. Have your Kleenex at the ready - you may get a bit emotional.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-LMiVWv-L4
That never ever ever gets old.
I might be biased against the Patriots and Tom Brady. If you watched the Super Bowl in 2001, you would get why.
So please understand; although this is indeed a Super Bowl related post, you will not see any stupid Patriots or Eagles cupcakes coming out of my kitchen. If you want to take any of these ideas and change them up to suit your team, feel free. Just understand that they probably won't taste as good as my LOS ANGELES RAMS CUPCAKES.
These are for you, daddy.
It's really nice to say Los Angeles Rams again. We remained loyal when they moved to St Louis all those years ago, but it's always felt weird rooting for a team in a city we've never even visited. Having them back is nice - now we can watch them lose closer to home! Granted they had a fantastic year this year, but lets be real - it hasn't been easy being a Rams fan since the year 2000 or so. It does get better, though - you kinda get used to the scorn and ridicule dished out by the ever-so-wonderful 49'ers fans that litter this area. In any case, they're back in L.A. where they belong, and they actually have an iota of potential for the first time in nearly 20 years. So I can't complain. And who knows? Maybe this time next year I'll be making Rams Super Bowl desserts because they're actually IN it!
STOP LAUGHING! IT'S POSSIBLE! Stop it.
OK, so speaking of Super Bowl desserts, I was tasked with coming up with something festive and simple that people could make for Super Bowl parties. In scouring the internet, I saw all kinds of yummy football shaped cookies, fancy cakes, rice krispy treats that looked like jerseys, and elaborate cake pops. But being the ultra creative and inventive person that I am, I decided to make cupcakes instead... like I always do.
I like cupcakes, OK?! And if you're looking for a simple dessert that's versatile and super cute, they're really the perfect thing. Plus they're inexpensive to make, and there are lots of things you can do to dress them up that are also cheap, yummy and easy. I'm going to show several ideas here, all of which were done using just one batch of chocolate cupcakes. The recipe I used is basically a doctored cake mix that tastes incredible and makes between 42 and 48 cupcakes per batch. This gives you enough to work with so that everyone is well fed, and it also allows you to get creative and do different styles if you so desire.
So lets check these out.
On several, I did a swirl of basic buttercream frosting with some sprinkles in my team colors - instant festiveness! I also found some blue and gold cupcake papers at Michaels. When I made these, I wasn't sure what direction I was going to go with everything. So I did all of the cupcakes in my favorite brown papers, then ended up setting some of them in the colorful papers later. It would probably look better to just bake them in their respective colored papers, but oh well. As far as sprinkles go, there are so many different styles out there - get a few different ones to change up the look and texture. Sprinkles are cheap, so you can probably afford to get a few different kinds.
If you want to get a bit more creative with the frosting, you can tint your frosting and make a colorful swirl of your team colors, and it looks badass! Plus, its way easier than you might think.
I colored some buttercream in blue and gold (using Americolor gel coloring. USE GEL, NOT LIQUID COLORING) and put each color into a 12" disposable decorating bag. I cut the bottom off and slightly flattened each bag.
I grabbed a 16" disposable bag and put a large open tip on the bottom, then set the frosting bags side by side and slid them down into the tip.
I did a basic swirl and that was it! I love this look - definitely no sprinkles needed for these.
Keep in mind - all of the supplies I'm using here are very inexpensive. Disposable decorating bags are a couple of bucks, as are decorating tips. And you can find them at Walmart, Michaels, Hobby Lobby, etc. I get my gel food coloring on Amazon, but you can find other brands at these stores as well.
OK moving on.
If you take a peek behind the swirly cupcakes, you'll see some cupcakes that kinda look like footballs. I got this idea from a fabulous blogger and thought they would be super fun to do... and they were! They're adorable, and when displaying all of the different cupcakes together, the brown did a nice job of breaking up the sea of blue and gold. They're also nice if you want to do something football-ish without committing to a specific team.
All you have to do is put some chocolate frosting into a decorating bag fitted with a small star tip. Then swirl it back and forth into kind of a diamond pattern, making sure you go from end to end of the cupcake.
Stuff some leftover buttercream into a decorating bag and cut off the bottom juuuust enough to leave a small hole. Then pipe on some laces and that's that. They don't have to be perfect - your team isn't either, so its fine.
Speaking of breaking up the sea of blue and gold, I had grand plans of adorning some of the sprinkled cupcakes with cute little chocolate footballs, but I did a poor job of planning out my week and ordered my football candy mold too late.
I went ahead and made some footballs when it came in anyway. I'm going to use them when I make more cupcakes later this week.
The candy mold was about 5 bucks on Amazon, and I found the chocolate candy melts at Michaels.
I had an epiphany on my way home from work yesterday - I think I'll use some gold luster dust on them to make them a little bit blingy! How cute would that be?! Either way, they would look pretty rad on top of a big pile of buttercream.
If you want to go an extra step in making it your cupcakes look festive (or obnoxious), you can also check online for team specific cupcake toppers. I actually ordered some little Rams helmets, but they ended up being ugly AF and they looked completely terrible. So make sure to read the reviews before ordering them. But if you get some decent ones, that could look pretty amazing.
OK so last but not least... I also did a big football-shaped cupcake pull apart. Because, like I said, I had a LOT of cupcakes to work with.
I messed with some of the leftover cupcakes until I had a good shape going.
I put a small dollop of frosting on the bottom of each one to make them stick to the cake board, then slathered on some chocolate frosting into a football shape. Here again, it doesn't have to be perfect. Its just going to get devoured anyway.
I still had a good amount of buttercream left over, so I put it into a decorating bag and cut a medium-ish hole on the bottom and piped on some laces and stuff.
Come on. You don't get more football party than this! And this same idea would be so easily translated into a baseball or basketball, too.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that frosting this football from start to finish took MAYBE three minutes. And how seriously cute is that?!
If you're the artistic type, you could also draw stuff on the cake board - make it look like a football field, draw your team logo, or whatever else floats your boat.
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Everything you've seen here is from one batch of cupcakes, one batch of buttercream and one batch of chocolate frosting. And from that, you can have a variety of looks to make your party food table look pretty incredible and taste pretty decadent. Combine with copious amounts of beer and chicken wings and you really can't go wrong! And if you're like me, with a team that hasn't played the bowl in for-ev-er, just try to enjoy the game anyway and know that you're not alone. Stay hopeful, have fun anyway, and always stay loyal.
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If you want to see the final product, possibly with blingy little chocolate footballs, you can watch me on Mornings on Fox 11 (Reno) this Wednesday January 31st at around 7:45am. And if you have any questions or feedback, shoot me a message! Even if its to bash my Rams - I'm used to it.