Football Cupcakes with Beer

This easy cupcake recipe is great for your Super Bowl parties, tailgates, team dinners or Senior Nights! If you love baking with beer, you'll love these Beer Cookies and these Stout Beer Cupcakes with Black Currant Frosting. These football cupcakes can also be made without beer!

Ingredients and Notes

Beer - Beer serves as both the flavor and the liquid in these football cupcakes. It keeps the cupcakes soft and moist, as well as flavorful. Whatever beer you like works great! One 12-oz beer is the perfect amount for the cake batter and both frostings.

Vegetable Oil - Vegetable oil serves as the fat in these football themed cupcakes. Vegetable oil gives the beer cupcakes a softer texture than butter, and also has a more neutral flavor allowing the beer flavor to shine.

Baking Powder - The baking powder helps these football cupcakes rise, contributing to the soft and fluffy texture.

Substitutions

Beer - To make football cupcakes without alcohol, a non-alcoholic beer works great, or the beer can be replaced with milk to have football cupcakes without the beer flavor.

Cocoa Powder - The cocoa powder is used to make brown frosting to decorate footballs onto the cupcakes. If you're not looking to decorate the cupcakes like footballs, you cake make theses beer cupcakes with beer buttercream frosting and replace the cocoa powder with additional powdered sugar.

Green Food Coloring - The white icing will make much more than is needed to pipe the football laces onto the cupcakes. Green food coloring can be added to the extra white icing to pipe green grass along the outside of the football.

How to Make this Recipe

Step 1: Combine the beer, vegetable oil, and eggs, and mix till combined.

Step 2: Add the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt, and whisk till incorporated.

Step 3: Divide batter into 18 cupcake liners and bake at 350°F for 18-22 minutes. Cool completely.

Step 4: Beat 1 tablespoon of butter until soft. Add remaining white icing ingredients and beat until smooth. Repeat with the full stick of butter and the chocolate icing ingredients.

Step 5: To pipe footballs, pipe the chocolate icing back and forth on the cupcake, starting with shorter lines, getting longer as you get to the center of the cupcake, and then getting shorter again as you get closer to the other side of the cupcake.

Step 6: Pipe the laces onto the football by piping a line of white icing longways across the piped chocolate, then pipe short lines crossing overtop of the long line.

Recipe FAQs

Tips & Tricks

Tip #1: Before putting the paper liners in the cupcake pan, put a few grains of uncooked rice into each cup of the muffin tin and put the paper liner on top of the rice. It will make the cupcakes super easy to remove from the pan once they're baked!

Tip #2: Use a whisk to mix the batter. The flour may form little pockets in the batter and a whisk will help ensure they are broken up and get fully incorporated.

Tip #3: Make the white icing before making the chocolate icing. The chocolate icing can be made in the same bowl as any remaining white icing will incorporate seamlessly. If you make the chocolate icing first, you will need a separate, clean bowl to make the white icing to ensure it stays white.

Tip #4: To decorate the football cupcakes without piping tips, use one zip-top bag for the chocolate icing and another for the white icing. Cut a bigger piece of the corner off the zip-top bag with chocolate frosting to pipe the footballs and a much smaller corner off the bag with white frosting to pipe the laces.

Storage Tips

Football Cupcakes with Beer should be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for 3-5 days.