March Madness sweet treats

We kicked off March Madness this year with a Bracket Party at J & C’s house on Saturday. I was asked to bring dessert so finally had it narrowed down to cookies and cupcakes by the night before. 

Basketball sugar cookies seemed like fun however I do not have a basketball cookie cutter, and time was short, so I had to come up with a way to make them look like a basketball without taking too long. 

A round cookie cutter is the closest thing to a basketball I have so any sort of detail had to be improvised. After giving it some thought and ruling out frosting I came up with plan. Once the cookies were cut out I pressed each side with the outer edge of the same circle cookie cutter and then took a knife and pressed in the cross down the middle.  Easy peasy, but I still thought the cookies needed a little something more. Perhaps some texture. All I could find that might work was my meat mallet so I tried that and liked how it looked. The DIY basketball cookies turned out to be fairly simple, however, there was one more little detail to add.

WORDS! Since this was a Bracket Party I decided to stamp the names of all the March Madness teams on the cookies. Since we were not hosting the party this year I had some extra time to spend on details. 

That actually took the longest since each letter had to be stamped individually by hand but it was fun and well worth it. 

Cupcakes were also on the baking list for the Bracket Party.

Basketball themed cupcakes of course. 

To make it simple I used Nilla wafters to make edible Basketball Picks for the tops of the cupcakes.

It was the wee hours of Saturday morning when I made the cute little basketball toppers so a good quiet project. They were easy to make and went together pretty quickly.

Once those were finished it was onto baking.

Two and half dozen cupcakes and then a couple dozen cookies after that. 

Thankfully all the sweet treats were finished and ready to go in time for the party. We had a great time and as always our brackets kept changing after each game. As for my bracket, it looked good after the first round of games however that all changed Saturday afternoon. I am now in eighth place with only a slight chance of moving to second place when all is said and done. It will be fun to see who in the family ends up as our bracket winner this year. 

Happy Thursday!