If you’re making cake cupcakes for Super Bowl feasting, you can ice them with your team colors. McCormick has the recipes for all the NFL team colors.

McCormick suggests adding the color to a 16-ounce can of white frosting, but if you have a picky palate, you might prefer to make your own buttercream or cream cheese frosting (here are the recipes).

Both sets of team colors require regular food colors and a box of McCormick NEON! food colors. The New England Patriots red also requires a bottle of black food color.

So get mixing and surprise your family and guests with something sweet, with our hopes that the day will be even sweeter when your team wins.
 
FROSTING TIPS

While it’s easy to frost a cake with half of each frosting color, McCormick offers these tips for cupcakes:

 
FROSTING VS. ICING: THE DIFFERENCE

The difference between frosting and icing is that icing is made with confectioners sugar’ (also called icing sugar and 10x sugar). But the two words are used interchangeably by those not aware of this nuance.

Soup and crackers was a popular dish at my mother’s table: animal crackers, oyster crackers, Royal Lunch Milk Crackers*, saltines, Uneeda Biscuits* (water biscuits) and Ritz crackers made frequent appearances. Our favorites were Nabisco’s Triscuits and Stoned Wheat Thins, imported from Canada.

The gourmet cracker market didn’t exist then. Sesame seed breadsticks were a rare specialty that we had to seek out in Italian markets in Little Italy. The handful of gourmet food stores and cheese stores sold the bland yet purportedly elegant Carr’s Water Biscuits, imported from England, and long flat rectangles of Middle Eastern lavasch.

But today, there are more fancy crackers than we could desire, serving up interesting flavor profiles and alluring appearances. You can find some in supermarkets, some at natural grocers like Whole Foods and some at specialty food stores. Look for:

Then, enjoy them with a bowl of soup, a plate of cheese or a craft beer, with or without an accompanying spread.
*Uneeda Biscuits and Royal Lunch crackers were Nabisco products that were discontinued after Kraft Foods acquired Nabisco.
  

These itty bitty cupcakes (about half the size of the photo) will delight kids and adults equally.

The Valentine Collection from Baked By Melissa—a pioneer in tiny cupcakes—includes three varieties. Packaged in a gift box with a pink ribbon, the Valentine Collection includes:

 
The round ball at the top is a chocolate-covered pretzel, adding crunch and a hint of salt to the sweet cupcakes. The cupcakes are bite-size: slightly larger than the diameter of a quarter, one or two bites.

In the words of Melissa, a little cupcake equals a lot of love.

The cupcakes, which are kosher-certified by OK, can be shipped nationwide and can be pre-ordered starting today. A 25-piece gift box is $25, plus shipping.

Shown here about twice the actual size, the cupcakes have the diameter of a quarter. Photo courtesy Baked By Melissa.

The Valentine gift box, tied with a pink ribbon. Photo courtesy Baked By Melissa.

CUPCAKE HISTORY

Before the advent of muffin tins, cupcakes were baked in individual tea cups or ramekins. The first reference to the miniature cakes dates to 1796, when a recipe for “cake to be baked in small cups” appeared in the cookbook, “American Cookery.” The earliest documentation of the term “cupcake” was in “Eliza Leslie’s Receipts cookbook” in 1828. [Source]

Cupcakes were convenient because they cooked much faster than larger cakes. It took a long time to bake a cake in a hearth oven; cupcakes baked in a fraction of the time.

Muffin tins became widely available around the turn of the 20th century, and offered new convenience to bakers. Paper and foil liners were created for easier removal of the cupcakes from the pan.

They evolved into children’s party fare, but in the last decade have taken a more sophisticated turn. First, some younger couples began to choose “cupcake trees” instead of conventional wedding cakes. This prompted a flurry of cupcake articles and recipes, and ultimately the opening of boutique cupcake bakeries nationwide, offering everyday treats.

Each Baked By Melissa cupcake has 70-90 calories, but that’s a workable daily treat. An average-size cupcake from Crumbs, Magnolia, Sprinkles and the like will run you 450 calories or so (here’s a calorie comparison).