#DeflateGate Super Bowl Egg Football Cupcake Thingies
If you live under a rock and/or don’t read The Skimm, today is Super Bowl Sunday. In honor of the occasion, I wanted to make a delicious themed treat, and Pinterest tells me that the only way to do this is to make a foodstuff that looks like a football. I scrolled through endless pages of football shaped snacks, and finally landed on these beauties.
Football cupcakes in real egg shells! What? Image from Cupcakeproject.com
Now I read this post and the accompanying one where the blogger tells you how to do regular old run-of-the-mill not football-shaped cupcakes in egg shells, and let me tell you, if you do this the right way, you may as well kiss your weekend goodbye. It involves hours of prep work, brown food coloring (beh?), and filling your eggs with exactly the right amount of cake so that they don’t overflow at all, but also still fill up enough to be egg-shaped.
It all sounded much too fucking complicated for me. (You guys have seen this blog, right?) So instead of dying my eggs brown, I had the bright idea to buy brown eggs. I figure I’m pretty brilliant that way.
If you want brown eggs, let the chickens do all the hard work.
The blog post said to use a corkscrew to poke a hole in the eggs, which sounds like a fine idea if you have a normal person corkscrew, but I have a corkscrew-impaired person corkscrew for those of us with remedial corkscrewing skills.
I love this corkscrew, but it’s not the best implement for poking holes in eggs, turns out.
Did it work?
Nope.
In searching my kitchen for other sharp, pointy things that might work to poke a delicate hole in an unboiled egg, I came upon this thing which you use to pick walnuts out of the shell and which we only get out about every 3 or 4 Christmases.
Nut pickers, it turns out, are the perfect implement to poke a hole in an egg. Just in case you needed to know.
On my second try, I actually got one to work.
Mr. Egg’s new anus
I must stop here and give you a bit of a content warning. If you don’t like oozy things that look like they could be body fluids, you might want to stop reading. Because, guys, eggs are lots grosser than I thought they were. I mean, I’ve cracked my share of eggs in my life, but I’ve never watched them slowly ooze out of a newly-created orifice.
Mrs. Egg is having some girl part problems.
It actually made me a little sad. I sort of felt like a back alley abortion doctor or something, watching little baby chicken placenta leak out, and every now and then assisting with an insistent jab of my pokey thing.
(I apologize if you can never eat an egg again because I’ve pointed out that you’re eating chicken amniotic fluid and stuff. I know it’s gross. It’s totally true though.)
After egg number 2, I thought I had it down. Then this happened to egg number 3. Sigh.
Let me see if I can express to you how stressful it is to carefully, oh so carefully, poke a tiny hole in an egg that may or may not explode in your hand when you poke said hole. It’s sort of like how I imagine diffusing a bomb would be, except in the bomb situation, at least you don’t have to worry about getting salmonella in your eye.
On top of that stress, it takes forever to perform each egg abortion. Forever. I must have spent an hour freeing 8 eggs from their unwanted chickies. (I’ll stop now. I think the line is there.)
Also, then you end up with all this.
Yeah, I ran out of ramekins and had to use high ball glasses.
At this point, you immerse the empty shells in a saltwater bath, which I neglected to take a picture of because I was still traumatized from the stress and time involved in emptying 8 eggshells.
After half an hour, you take them out of the saltwater, rinse them, and let them dry. I don’t know why. I’m just following the damn rules.
While they’re drying, you make your cake. If you’re me, that means opening a box of cake mix. On the plus side, I got to use up three of my shell-less eggs. So now I only have, like 7 still sitting in the fridge like weird alien petri dishes.
Then you nestle the eggs carefully in a cupcake tin lined with foil.
And if you’re following directions, you pipe your cake batter in with a piping bag. Pintester ain’t got no time for a piping bag. So I used my usual trick: a baggie with a hole cut in one corner. Don’t judge. It totally works.
Another content warning: I’m about to make a really gross analogy.
Have you guys ever heard of fecal transplants? They are exactly what they sound like. Basically, someone’s guts are missing all the good poop, and so to fix the situation, a poop donor (not kidding) gives a sample, the doctor blends it with saline, and then shoots it up the transplant recipient’s anus, et voila. Fecal transplant. It’s real science.
So my poor eggs, empty shells after their back-alley abortions, now had to undergo fecal transplants at the hands of the same hack doctor (me). I’m so sorry, eggs.
I carefully filled them like halfway full, hoping to avoid overflow. You know what happens, guys.
Also, there was leftover batter so I made cupcakes too. Why the hell not, right?
Now here’s the part where I would have burst into tears had I actually followed the directions and dyed the eggs like I was supposed to because the original blog post says that if this happens, you’re basically fucked because if you take the extra batter off with a paper towel or something, the dye comes off, too.
HA HA! Try as you may, you cannot wipe the brown off these eggs because they came out of the chicken that way. Suck it, Internet. I am smarter than you.
Of course, if I hadn’t already sunk hours into this project, I might have quit here, because it was a painstaking and time-consuming process to wipe all of this clean.
The last step is the most brilliant of all, I’m telling you. So these really don’t look like footballs, right? I mean, they’re sort of just brown eggs with a mysterious anus. So what do you do with brown things that need to look like footballs? You paint seams on them, of course. But what might be suitable for painting white on a brown egg? Hmm.
I told you. Brilliant.
You may ask, “But isn’t White Out toxic and shouldn’t you use something that won’t kill someone if they accidentally eat it?” to which I reply, if you are enough of a dumbfuck to eat the shell with the White Out on it, I have no sympathy. Also, I am so done with this project and do not wish to devote any more time to thinking about an edible way to make this work. So there.
Fine, they’re not as cute as the originals, but I also spent approximately 2.7 days less on mine (even though it still took like half a day).
They’re supposed to look like footballs, but hey. You do what you gotta do.
I cracked one open to see what it was like to actually eat one, too, and it was a little bit of a pain in the ass, guys. I don’t even like peeling actual eggs to eat them, and peeling a cupcake to eat it is super annoying. Also it doesn’t peel nicely. But it tastes like a cupcake so there’s that.
In conclusion, this took hours of my life that I will never get back, it’s not that cool, and I will never do it again. The end.
