Happy Sunday! We are only one week away from the Super Bowl! We are 49'rs fans but whether you are a San Francisco fan or a Baltimore fan you will want to have fun finger food for your party and that includes desserts.

Today's cupcakes are, obviously, not an original idea. I'm sure that there are millions of tables that will sport a version of this design. The difference is in the execution of the design. I recently saw "bakery" football cupcakes that had a smear of green icing with a long blob of brown icing and a few squiggles of white "lines" on top. The "footballs" looked more like what came out of an animal than a football. Immediately I thought, "Well, I can do better than THAT!". 

The "grass" tip is one of my favorites in the Wilton line of decorating tips. It looks like a thimble with lots of holes poked into the flat top. Most commonly it's used to create grass but you can also use it for fur or shag carpeting looks as well. I will warn you that, like making stars all over a cake, this can be hard on the hands. But it is SO worth it! 

I baked the dark chocolate cupcakes in gold trimmed liners for our 49'rs team but you could bake them in purple or yellow liners for the Raven's if you'd like. Then, when the cupcakes were cool, I topped them with the green icing with the "grass" tip.

The footballs are actually fudge. I used a round cookie cutter to cut out a circle and then moved the cutter over to cut the circle in half which makes a pointed end at the edges of the piece of chocolate. You could use melted chocolate that hasn't totally set up or even chocolate "eggs" if you can find them. Naturally you could also pipe brown frosting in the shape of footballs as well. I used fudge because I had also planned to make cocoa powder covered fudge truffles to set out from the left over fudge as well. The lines are just white frosting.

Now if you don't have any tips at all here is a way to get the same look. Frost the cupcakes with the green frosting and then, using the tines on a fork, poke the frosting and pull up many times to make little "peaks" in the frosting. Use chocolate candy for the footballs. For the thin white lines just put some white frosting into a zip lock bag and cut a bit off of the corner. It's even easier to make the field lines and numbers using this last technique with the zip lock bags. Just because you don't have all the bags, tips and other tools to pipe with doesn't mean you can't make these fun cupcakes!

Hope you all enjoy your Super Bowl Parties! Check our Facebook fan site for daily Super Bowl tips this week beginning today and take a look tomorrow for our Super Bowl Party Plan on our Cherry Party Blog !

Next Sunday I'll reveal another of the new Demo Wedding Cakes! See you then!

Cat