Bella is baking: Manchester United Cupcakes

Yes this is for a Manchester United fan. He is 12 years old today. I know him, or more like know his mother for 7 years , so I have sort of "watched" him grew up. I still remember when her mum told me about his first day in primary 1, now he is primary 6. Time flies really fast.

My big cakelette aka Hebe knew about this cupcake project. She told me yesterday that she wanted to wake up early to help me bake the cupcakes. She woke up at 6 am and I was still too sleepy because I made the fondants deco till 2 am; and told her to sleep again. She was upset :p. She refused to sleep although I patted and patted and patted her until my hands were super tired. At the end she looked for daddy who has woken up, and after a few minutes she slept in his arms.

This soccer theme is very fun. First I have to make the nice bright red color of MU uniform. Once the uniforms are cut, the next challenge would be to write on the uniforms. Initially I put AIG instead of AON, coz I didnt know they have changed their sponsor. Now you know, I am not MU fan, or to be exact, I am not even soccer fan. I cant stand spending 2 hours in front of TV to watch 22 people running after one ball. I would rather utilize the 2 hours for my beauty sleep.

After I finished writing the AIG for all the uniforms, only three actually, I proudly presented my creation to hubby. He immediately screamed and said that it is no longer AIG and started lecturing me that he told me before to check what is the uniform. He then showed that it is supposed to be AON. *sigh*. I managed to "erase" the "I" and "G", then replace them with "O" and "N" ^-^ .. not too bad.
This is the result before cleaned up.

After the uniforms were completed, I continued with the shawl. I like making the end part, the black thing, it reminded me of a mermaid tail. The shawl is quite straight forward to make.

Making the ball is quite fun too. Although it is not as simple as it looks like. First I tried making the pentagon without template, and it was totally ugly. I gave up, printed mini pentagon template and then cut the shapes on black fondants. The result is pretty cute I think.

More pics below. I hope the birthday boy likes his cupcakes. The cakes are chocolate genoise sponge cake with Callebaut chocolate ganache filling and topped with either vanilla buttercream (green ones) or chocolate buttercream (red ones). Because of the chocolate, the red color of the buttercream is not as bright as I want them to be.