Spring Gardening in the Kitchen

I am not known for my baking skills…I like to bake, yes, and my family has never complained about any baked good I have put in front of them. 🙂 But I would never claim to have the skills of some I have come across while surfing the web. In fact, far from it…

But it all started when I found these at the store:

They were just so darn cute! I had to get them. And that single fact set me off on baking trail I don’t often visit.

My supplies were:

Umm….there are some things missing from this picture. I obviously needed cake mix and frosting! I used what I happened to have in my pantry – good ol’ yellow cake mix and vanilla frosting (I have an issue with certain people in my family not liking chocolate – I know it’s weird, but please don’t judge!).

You must take note of the Edible Easter Grass in the picture too. What a cool idea! With the flowerpots in hand, I immediately knew I had to buy the grass as well.

And because I had only bought 12 flowerpots and the mix made 2 dozen cupcakes, I decided to make a batch of regular cupcakes as well, to transform into bird nests, I also grabbed some coconut and green food coloring out of the cabinet.

Back to the baking session. 🙂 I baked up the cupcakes according to the package directions. They came out perfect!

Next up was preparing the Oreos to make the dirt…nothing a couple of helpers and a mallet couldn’t take of!

And yes, on the bottom of the picture, you’ll notice the cream filling from the Oreos. The kids were not going to let that go to waste. Nothing like a little straight sugar to keep your help happy! 🙂

Once I frosted all the cupcakes, we dipped covered them with the dirt mixture:

It was a very messy job!

Now they were ready to decorate!

At this point, I got so into the decorating (plus my helpers’ friends showed up and took all my free labor away from me, so I was on my own) that I didn’t take any more pictures of the process, but I think you can figure out how it went. 🙂

I love them! First up, the flowerpot cupcakes:

I broke up bits and pieces of the edible easter grass and stuck it into the cupcakes like growing grass. Added a couple of jelly beans, and then some flower and Easter toppers.

The toppers are part of an Easter set that I made to add a of bit Spring color and Easter into my kitchen. I’ll be sharing the banner pictures in another post, so stay tuned.

For the bird nest cupcakes, I colored the coconut green, mixed it with a little bit of frosting to make it stickier, then molded them into the shape of nests. Once ready I added a couple of eggs to each nest.

I think everyone liked them, since they were standing around as I was playing photographer, asking if they could be eaten as soon as I was done taking my pictures! I’m kinda sad to see them disappear after all the fun we had creating them!