Mini Planters

This weekend Evan and I were inspired to bring some “green” in to our apartment. While Evan worked on potting some house plants, I went to work on these little guys. If you look a little closer, you will see that these are actually cupcakes! I don’t have what you would call a green thumb, but I have been in a baking mood. I found these on marthastewart.com and thought they looked like the right amount of challenge for a Sunday baking session. I used her cupcake recipe, but used canned frosting and they turned out adorable and delicious. The green “plants” are mint sprigs, but beware if you make these, they wilt pretty quickly, so don’t put them in until the last minute.

The Martha directions can be found here, but just for fun, this was my process:

1. First, I prepped my 6 oz. unglazed terra cotta pots by soaking them in soapy water in the sink and then rinsing and drying them. I then cut little circles of parchment paper to put in the bottom of the pots so that the batter wouldn’t drip through the bottom. Then I brushed the inside of each pot with vegetable oil and dusted with cocoa powder.

2. I prepared by batter and then evenly divided it in each pot and set them on my baking sheet. I had a little batter left over, so I filled 6 regular cupcakes and stuck them all in the oven at 350. The regular cupcakes were done in 20 minutes, but the pots had to stay about 10 minutes longer. I opened the oven a bunch of times to look at them because I don’t have an oven light, so you probably won’t have to bake them this long if your oven stays at 350.

3. After the cupcakes were baked and cooled, I crushed up a bunch of Tuxedo Penguins Safeway brand chocolate cookies (they were on sale for $1.99). I frosted each cupcake with chocolate frosting from a can. Then I sprinkled the crushed cookies to cover the frosting and inserted my mint sprig.