baseball cupcakes

My oldest son Matthew started Little League baseball earlier this year, and it was so much fun! He had a great time making new friends and being part of a team, and we had a great time going to all his games and eating concession stand food! (My new favorite guilty pleasure is chili cheese fries - so good!)

Part of the Little League experience was interacting with the other parents, and taking turns being in charge of "team snack" at the end of each game. When it was our turn, we decided to make baseball cupcakes, along with mini ham and cheese sliders, and goodie bags filled with snacks, fresh fruit, and juice.

For the cupcakes, I used my favorite chocolate cupcake recipe (in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), and topped them with cream cheese frosting. My method for creating uniform domes of frosting is to use a piping bag fitted with a large round piping tip, and do kind of an up-and-down pumping motion when piping the frosting from the center of the cupcake. The up motion releases more frosting, while the down motion kind of pushes the frosting outwards, forming a nice round dome. (You can see more of this in my basketball cupcakes post).

Then I used red frosting and a small round piping tip to pipe the lines on each baseball, similar to how I pipe my baseball cookies (see here and here).

Overall, we had a great baseball season, even though we lost more games than were won!

Little League season ended in the beginning of summer, and then when school started my son decided to try out for his middle school baseball team (he started 6th grade this year). To our surprise, he made it! 

Here's to more baseball cupcakes in our future!

baseball cookies for a little slugger baby shower

It's amazing to me that because of the blog, I have reconnected with several friends from high school. I mean, how cool is that?! So several month ago, another friend from high school contacted me about doing baseball cookies for a baby shower she was hosting. I had done baseball cookies before, but this time she also wanted baseball bat cookies. So thanks to my handy husband who is an awesome cookie cutter maker, he made me another custom copper cutter!

After making my favorite sugar cookie dough (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), I rolled the dough out to about 1/8" thick, used my shiny new baseball bat cutters to cut out shapes, baked them at 350F until golden brown, and then let them cool. (I did have one tray of cookies that spent a little too much time in the oven though, oops!)

Anyway, for the rest of the cookies, once cooled I used stiff brown royal icing (recipe also in my book!) to outline my bats, and then runny brown icing to fill them in.

The final touch was adding blue and red "tape" to the bats, and little lines to suggest the wood pattern in the bats.

Aren't they cute?!

For the baseball cookies, you can see more in this post of how I made them, but I basically followed the same steps - outline with stiff icing, fill with runny icing, and then add final touches with stiff icing.

I also made little baseball jersey cookies, using a onesie cookie cutter, and decorated them with piped stripes to give them a jersey look.

I think these would be great for a birthday party or a little league party as well!

Happy baby shower!!!

baseball cookies and onesie cookies

Remember these pastel Hello Kitty cookies, macarons, and mini cupcakes that I made for a bridal shower a couple of years ago? Well recently that bride contacted me about making goodies again ... this time for her baby shower! So exciting!!!

She had originally wanted a cake and cookies with a baseball theme, but the weekend of the baby shower was the same weekend that I was to be in LA to give a Hello Kitty cupcake workshop. So she opted for just the cookies to be done several days in advance, as I could wrap each one individually to keep them fresh for the baby shower.

For the baseball cookies, I used my go-to sugar cookie recipe (which can be found in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), rolled the dough out to 1/8 inch thick, and cut out shapes with a 3.5 inch round cookie cutter. Then after baking and cooling, I whipped up a batch of royal icing (recipe also in the book!), piped a circle outline with stiff icing, and then filled it in with runny icing.

After the white icing had dried for several hours, I used red stiff icing and a Wilton #2 tip to pipe my baseball stitches on the cookies.

I repeated the same process for the onesie cookies, except with this onesie cookie cutter, and with blue icing for the onesie details.

So cute!

Congratulations Julieta! Hope you had a wonderful baby shower!