The French Open Cupcakes

Today was the 4th Annual French Open.  In case your were busy watching the Little League World Series, I'll recap.  A good friend, Chris French, started a ping pong tournament where each contestant represents a randomly assigned country.  Each year the tournament has grown, and it's now it's of epic proportions.

I wanted to make a ping pong-themed dessert to bring, so I made ping pong paddle cupcakes.  Considering the 90+ degrees it's been in California this week, the thought of turning on the oven was actually pretty unappealing but it was worth it.  I'm pretty pleased with the results (before the cupcakes and I started melting).

I may not be wonderful at ping pong, but I'm the world champion of cupcake eating.

I found a ping pong paddle image online and copied it a bunch of times.  I covered the clipart with wax paper.

Then, I traced.  I tried filling in the paddles with the brown chocolate completely and then making a second layer of the red on top.  It worked better with making just the outline with brown.  

When they hardened (which took forever since it's so darn hot), I made a frosting ping pong ball and stuck them on top of cupcakes.