America, I have a confession… I do not like football.

You see, the problem is that I have a brother who is 11 years older than me.  So when I was toddling around and full of Animaniac enthusiasm, he wanted to watch football with his friends.  Football!  A complete mystery to me then and now.  If you want to see people run into each other repeatedly, then let’s watch Looney Tunes!  And so began my football grudge.  

For years and years I refused to learn the rules.  The funny thing is, I’m a band geek.  I joined marching band when I was 11.   Yet, in spite of marching roughly a gazillion football games, I never tried to understand the game until my freshman year of college.  Up until that point, as far as I could tell, someone started with the ball, everyone ran into each other, they stopped, they lined up again, they ran into each other again… and then they randomly gave the ball to the other team and sometimes people cheered and sometimes they didn’t.   But in college, we actually had to watch the games so we knew what songs to play… and we played different songs depending on whether it was a first down or 2nd down, so I had to learn what “downs” were.   Things made a little more sense once downs entered the picture.   But I still don’t get it…. it’s long and slow and mysterious.   Maybe I just feel that way because my alma mater is a basketball school.  With all the football games I marched, we never won a single game against a division one team.   

So, while I don’t like football, I do love cupcakes.  I’ve been reading Bakerella lately, and I got obsessed with the idea of making football cupcakes!   

sporty cupcake!

The cupcakes themselves were my mom’s wonderful top secret dark chocolate cake.   She owns World’s Best Cookie (whose incredible vegan cookies can be found in places like Wild Oats, Earthfare, Whole Foods, and random coffee shops) and she intends on marketing cake-mixes soon… and so while I’m allowed to make the cake, I’m not allowed to share the recipe.  But believe me, it is the best chocolate cake I’ve ever had and it is the only chocolate cake recipe I will use.   The frosting is a vegan vanilla buttercream, made with Earth Balance, and  the “grass” is green-tinted coconut.  

Heavenly! ... get it? Because the Saints won?

If footballs were really made out of oreo truffles, I’d be way more interested in the sport.   

Bakerella explains the footballs here – but I did it a little differently, of course.  For one, I used all natural Newman-O’s.. Oreos might be vegan but who wants all that hydrogenation?   And I used Tofutti Cream Cheese (mmmmmm).   Also, I’m not a big fan of these candy melt, chocolate bark things.  Why use chocolate bark when you can use real chocolate?   I melted down some high quality semi-sweet chocolate with a little bit of Spectrum shortening and coated my football tuffles.  Lastly, vegan white chocolate is extremely hard to find, so I just mixed up some white decorating frosting and used that to pipe on the details.  

At this point, I still didn’t really want to have to watch an entire football game, but I had put so much effort into the cupcakes, I had no choice but to go to a Super Bowl party!   In the end, I was glad I went because it was good fun…. and because I amused myself with coming up with random reasons to cheer for the Saints:

1. My parents were raised Catholic and Catholicism is all about saints
2. I reeeeally love pancakes.  And I associate pancakes with Fat Tuesday, which is associated with Mardi Gras, which is associated New Orleans.
3. I really love the Anne Rice novels set in New Orleans, not to mention John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

So my newfound team won and cupcakes were enjoyed by all.  Who knows?  With the help of pastries, I might become a football fan yet.