Soccer Cupcakes :: The How-To

I promised a little how-to for Saturday's soccer cake made out of individual cupcakes.  This is so simple to do and the cute factor was big ... well, before I dropped the container.  After the drop, not so cute.

To make the cake, bake individual, regular-sized cupcakes.  To make it easy, we {we being Kennedy} baked them from a mix.  Once cool, arrange the cupcakes in a circular formation.  I started with the cupcake right in the middle and worked in rows: five cupcakes in the center row, four cupcakes in the rows on either side of center, and three cupcakes in the outer rows.

I initially was going to make it look just like a soccer ball but the asymmetrical look of the pentagons with lines only coming out of the corners of the middle pentagon {is that confusing?} looked wrong since the cake is flat.  The first two photos show my original formation so don't let that confuse you.

You'll need two colors of icing for the cake.  I used white and chocolate {again, both storebought}.  You could color white icing black {if you don't mind magenta lips and teeth after} or even use another color ... soccer balls come in lots of bright colors these days.

Start with the chocolate icing.  I placed some in a plastic bag and cut the corner off to make a cheap, disposable piping bag.  Pipe the outline of a pentagon on the middle cupcake and every second cupcake in the outer circle {make the top of the pentagon point toward the center}.  Once the outlines are piped on, use icing to fill in the pentagon.

For cleaner lines, you will then pipe white icing around each of the brown pentagons and around the edges of the bare cupcakes in the outer row.  That makes it really easy to spread the rest of the white icing up to those lines without getting them into the brown.  Spread the icing right over the spaces between cupcakes.

When the cupcakes are completely covered, pipe brown lines from the point of the outer pentagons to the corners of the inner pentagon.  And you're done!

With nine years of kids playing soccer, I've made a lot of soccer-themed cakes and cupcakes and this was definitely one of my favorites.  I'd love to hear if you make it too.