What an easy way to show a little team spirit.  Obviously, I was going for a yellow and green theme here (the colors of my son’s tennis team).  For the 1st cupcake I tinted half the batter yellow and half green.  I swirled the two together to make a tie-dye cake.  It was very easy and definitely showed that the cupcakes were not store bought.  My kids are very spoiled and won’t touch a store bought dessert.  I’ve been wanting to try different techniques for tie-dying frosting.  This gave me the perfect opportunity to give it a whirl.  For the 1st cupcake, I painted the inside of the piping bag with yellow and green gel die and filled the bag with white frosting.  The piped colors were very vibrant – perhaps a little too much so and colored everyone’s tongues.  For the 2nd cupcake, I placed white, yellow, and green frosting in a single piping bag.  This only took a little extra time to fill the bag carefully.  I was pleased that the colors didn’t completely blend together.

In the future, I would use these techniques for holiday occasions as well.  Remember when mixing two colors of cake batter that is looks better if you use a bit more of the lighter colors than darker colors.

Unlike real tennis balls that are empty, these cupcakes are filled with vanilla buttercream.  Besides using a golden yellow frosting on top, I dipped each cupcake in yellow sugar so that it would have a “fuzzy” appearance like a real tennis ball.  It was fun baking these for my son’s tennis team, but nothing is better than playing tennis with my kids.