wimbledon – Mamma wears Prada

I’m not joking, I JUST realised that the World cup is still on! Well, you cannot really blame me, Italy was kicked out very early this time so really not point for me to keep watching footballplayers faking pain, on a grass right?

The real excitment for me is WIMBLEDON! I loooove tennis and unfortunately this year I haven’t had much chance to watch it but I’m all ready and set for tomorrow final where Roger Federer will attempt to win the record of 8 Wimbledon titles if he wins against Novac Djokovic! This is a tough call eh!?!?

Anyway, if the weather is good we are planning to find a place where we can follow the match on a big screen outside, ideally lying on a grass and having a pic-nic with the children. If the weather is not good (strange enough it does happen sometimes in Scoland :)), we will then be spending the afternoon home, comfortable on the sofa munching treats. So what better treat to get into the Wimbledon final spirit than having some Tennis lemon cupcakes?!

It literally took me only 1 hour to make two batches (one of cupcakes and one of cakepops) make some quick mascarpone frosting and decorate the tennis balls.

I think they look cute!

Simple and easy lemon cupcake recipe:

125g of softened butter
125g of caster sugar
2 medium eggs
100g of self raising flour
2 tbsp of milk
2 lemons

For the mascarpone frosting

250g of mascarpone
100g of icing sugar
green gel colour

For the decoration

100 gr of fondant
yellow gel colour

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Line a cupcake pan with paper liners.

In a bowl or in a stand mixer, beat together the sugar and butter until fluffy and pale. Add the eggs one at a time, zest of the two lemons and a little squeeze of juice. Gradually add the flour mixture alternating with the milk. Spoon the mixture into the paper cases until they are 2/3 full.

Bake for 15/18 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of a cupcakes comes out clean. Cool cupcakes completely on a wire rack before frosting. To make the tennis balls I spooned the same mixture in a cakepop machine (you can use the cakepop silicone too) and cook them for about 6 minutes.

For the green frosting simply gently mix the mascarpone with the sifted icing sugar and then add few drops at the time of green gel colour until you reach the desired colour.

To decorate the tennis balls first divide the fondant in two equal parts. Roll out some white fondant to 3mm tickness, cut out a circle and used it to cover 3/4 of each cake pop ( I cut 1/3 of each cakepop so that they can sit better on the grass). To make the fondant stick to the cakepop spread the latter with some butter first. Smooth the fondant and cut off the excess.

To make yellow fondant add few drops of yellow gel colour to the white fondant. Roll it out a little thicker than the white one, cut a circle and make the additional cuts on both sides. Peel the excess yellow fondant and carefully smooth the yellow bits of fondant on the white cakepop to recreate the look of a tennis ball (I guess you can use these pictures as an example or just get a real tennis ball!) .

To assemble the tennis cupcakes first you need to make “the grass” by spooning the mascarpone frosting into a piping bag fitted with a pierced tip. Squeeze the bag on the top of the cupcake to form grass and gently lift the icing bag up as you keep squeezing. Then stop squeezing and pull it off. The grass should stand upright.

Once you got your grass you just need to place the cakepop tennis ball in the middle and you done!