It’s funny I’m writing this post the day after my face was smacked by a ball during my football game, but I have been trying to show the world that football can be girly. And since World Cup is going to start tomorrow very early morning (in this part of the world at least), there is no better time wager on this belief.

After my bold statement of shocking pink football shoes (what can be more girly than pink, seriously?), last weekend I decided to combine football with another thing that is as girly as it can be – baking cupcakes.

Okay, I wouldn’t lie and say that I did the whole baking because no one would ever buy that. My role for the day was more of a cupcake decorator, using whatever limited knowledge I had on football and even more limited knowledge on cupcake decorating to whip up something that people could tell was related to football, Team England and worthy to enter a contest. It was all a trial and error process and stay with me till the very end to see the result!

Let me start with less appealing pictures. Shaky photos were the result of me attempting to take photos with my icing-covered hands.

Slowly the magic unravelled. Cupcakes were baked and they were ready for decoration!

Notice the green cupcakes at the end, they were absolutely tricky to make (for dummies like us).

First you have to mould the white icing into the shape of a ball, which was frankly the easiest part of the whole process. After that came the painful process of using black icing and piping bag with the smallest end you could possibly find and draw black pentagons on the icing. Of course none of them turned out to be pentagons and appeared just like black blobs all over.

The next tricky thing was the t-shirt. Since there was no t-shirt shaped cutter, we had to make do with, guess what, a Christmas tree cutter and trim off the edges. The result, I have to say, was quite impressive.

 Afterwards, it was just a matter of putting these on top of green icing.

The last bit of our artistic juice was spent to arrange our different cupcakes into a plateful that represents the English national team.

We certainly looked very pleased with our work. Presenting to you, the happy bakers beaming proudly at our job well done.

To serve as icing to the cake, we were not the only ones pleased with our work. Our team actually won the best presentation during the food charity contest in the office, which was quite an achievement considering this was the first time we really decorated cupcakes!

A sweet beginning to this year’s World Cup. After weeks of contemplating, I simply have to support Team England post this arduous but fun journey (and a case of escalation of commitment).

Have fun watching everyone! 🙂