Spring is in the air, and, as always, with it comes heaps and heaps of baby showers. And with those baby showers comes CAKE…lots and lots of delicious cake. In the spirit of this lovely baby- and cake-filled season, I offer you this adorable idea (brace yourselves): chocolaty cupcakes, baked in tiny flower pots, adorned with beautiful Spring blooms!

I. Know.

These sweet little flower pot cupcakes are the epitome of Spring, and, while they make for quite an impressive presentation, they really are quite simple to pull off. The secret to these little beauties is in preparing your flower pots: they’ll need to be unglazed and untreated in order to be food-safe, but they must be well-oiled or your cakes will be stuck in there forever. And nobody wants that.

There are a few places on the internet which offer very specific instructions for “curing” your pots before baking in them, but, while I’m sure that method works very well, I followed Martha Stewart’s (much simpler) method for preparing my pots and it worked just fine. Go with the instructions that you feel most comfortable with (or, if you want to avoid all of this, you can simply bake the cakes in cupcake liners and place them into the pots once they’ve cooled.)

Per Martha, I purchased (inexpensive) unglazed, untreated terra cotta pots from my local craft store, washed them in hot, soapy water, and set them aside to dry. I measured and cut small circles of parchment to fit in the bottom of each pot so my cake batter didn’t leak out of the hole in the pot. I prepared my cake batter as usual, and, when it was ready (and the oven preheated), I placed a parchment circle in each pot and oiled the insides of my pots very well. I set the pots on a sturdy baking sheet, filled them 2/3 full, as I do for traditional cupcake liners, and then baked them as stated in my recipe. Simple!

When your little cakes are baked through (use the toothpick test), move them, pot and all, to a wire rack to cool thoroughly while you plot and plan the best way to decorate the little cuties. There are so many ways to decorate these—edible rocks, crushed chocolate sandwich cookies for potting soil, sugared flowers, fresh flowers (Insert a straw into the cake to hold the flower stem, and please be aware that some flowers are poisonous! Do not use these.), the possibilities are endless.

I opted to simply frost my cakes with vanilla frosting and then sprinkle them with green sugar to resemble grass (tinted coconut would work great here as well.) Then I topped each one with a variation of these DIY Party Picks. I modified my original idea by tracing one of my cookie cutters onto colored paper and inserting it between two round sticker labels from Big Dot to make darling personalized flowers to plant in my cupcake flower pots. And if that doesn’t get you in the mood to embrace Spring, I don’t know what will…

Enjoy!

Posted by Shannon, a Dot-arilla blogger