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!

basketball cupcakes

My youngest baby just turned FIVE!!! Where does the time go?!

Every year I make him birthday cupcakes. First there were these meatloaf cupcakes, as well as funfetti cupcakes. Next came Elmo cupcakes, and the next year Cookie Monster cupcakes because he was super into Sesame Street at that time. And now the thing that he is absolutely and completely obsessed with is BASKETBALL. He loves it. Can't get enough of it. We watch almost every Golden State Warriors game on TV. He plays basketball outside in our backyard when the weather is nice. Otherwise, he shoots hoops inside, because we have one of those small plastic basketball hoops that hangs over a door near the kitchen. He knows all the numbers of every Warriors player. He can even commentate while we are watching Warriors games, and does a pretty good job of it! So naturally, this year he asked for basketball cupcakes!

For the batter, I used my favorite chocolate cake recipe (which you can find in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), which also works great for cupcakes!

Once the cupcakes were baked and cooled, I whipped up a batch of cream cheese frosting (you can also find this recipe in my book). I tinted the majority of it with bright orange gel-based food coloring. And then I used a disposable pastry bag fitted with a large round tip, and piped big round mounds of frosting on each cupcake.

Then I tinted the remaining portion with super black gel-based food coloring, and used a small round tip to pipe the details of each basketball.

And then they were done!

I finished decorating them just in time to bring them to his preschool class party, so I loaded them up in my cupcake courier (my favorite way to transport cupcakes!) and brought them to school.

I also made goody bags for him to pass out to his classmates - blue and gold (Warriors colors) paper bags filled with mini bouncy basketballs, basketball-shaped whistles, basketball pencils, basketball chocolate candies, and basketball pillow mints. And all tied with matching ribbon and a handmade DIY basketball favor tag that I (painstakingly) drew with a sharpie and cut out of orange construction paper.

We decided not to have a real party (sadly, he has never had a real birthday party! Poor kid, I guess that's what happens when you're the third kid!) Instead, we bought him the ultimate birthday gift for a kid who loves Warriors basketball. WE TOOK HIM TO A WARRIORS GAME!

Happy Birthday, my Micah! Hope you enjoyed your basketball birthday!

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!!!