Super Moist Chocolate Earth Day Themed Cupcakes

As many of you probably know, today is earth day! And what better way to celebrate than some super moist chocolate cupcakes to make at home, designed just like little flower plants. Since it is Earth Day and our carbon foot print relies partly on the food we eat, I thought it would be a good idea to share a vegan chocolate cupcake recipe today.

You are going to want to first bake these chocolate cupcakes using my recipe you can find at the bottom of this blog. Then follow along with how I made these cute potted plant desserts. TIP: Fill the cupcake holders ¾ way full instead of ½ way because you want the cupcakes to slightly overfill when baking to fit firmly into the mini flower pots.

To help you prepare, let me initially list all the things you are going to need:

• Mini Baking Plant Pots
• 1/2 batch of Vanilla Buttercream Frosting (Click the link to find the recipe for one of my favorite buttercream frostings!) – I swapped out the butter with vegan butter. Earth Balance and Pure Blends coconut butter are a couple of my favorites.
• Blue Food Dye (or whatever color you want your flower to be)
• Rose Petal Decorating Tip
• 1 Piping Bag
• Super Moist Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes
• Pearl Sprinkles

After you have baked your cupcakes, let them cool for about 15-20 minutes before you start designing them. If not, they might fall apart because they are just SO fluffy and moist! 😂 They will also melt your icing if you start piping too fast.

This design is surprisingly simplistic and would be great to have any kid help make!

Now you are going to pipe out the flower onto the chocolate cupcakes. The easiest way for me to explain this is through video, so I will just leave that below for you!

Next you will take your sugar pearl sprinkles and put them in the center of the flower to give it the finishing touch!

Last, but not least you are going to want to fit the cupcakes so they sit evenly within the flower pot and you are done!

….Well unless you do want the earth lollipops like shown in the initial picture. I added an extra earth day flare to these super moist earth day themed cupcakes since I had some extra cut out sugar cookie dough I wanted to use.

To make these cut out cookies you will need:

• Cut Out Sugar Cookie Dough
• Lollipop Sticks
• ½ Batch of Royal Icing (Blue, Green) – Check out my favorite Royal Icing Recipe by clicking the link!
• 2 Piping Bags
• Mini/Small Circle Cookie Cutter
• Parchment Paper

To begin with, roll out your cookie dough to about ¼ inch thick and use your cookie cutter to cut out as many cookies as you have potted chocolate cupcakes.

Next, you will flip them over, you want the pretty side to NOT have the indentation from the lollipop stick you’re about to put in. So flip them over onto the baking sheet with parchment paper and press the lollipop sticks into the cookie. I personally used longer 8 inch cake pop sticks, but cut them in half for this purpose. If you don’t already have some at home just buy the 4 inch ones at the store!

Stick those in the oven for about 10 min and dye the royal icing while you wait! Divide it in half, dying one half green and the other blue…for the green land and water, which I’m sure you figured out already. 😉

Let the cookies cool for 15 min and thennnn… PAUSE

You might notice that the lollipop sticks are not staying in the back of the cookie, which happened to me. To fix that, you are going to use some of the royal icing and fill the indentation where the stick should be, then lay the stick on it to dry together. After I did this I had no problem with the lollipop stick falling off.

Here comes the fun part, designing the cookie! For me the structure of the earth’s land to water ratio changed slightly between each cookie, but this part you can put your own creativity into when creating the outline of land. 

Once you have all the land done on each cookie, the first should be dry enough to go back and fill in with blue royal icing and follow after with each other cookie in the same order you started.

Now you have little earth cookies on a stick! How cute! Add this finishing Earth Day touch to the chocolate cupcakes by sticking straight into the cupcake and this is what you should have…

Happy Earth Day and while you’re eating those delicious, super moist chocolate cupcakes, leave a comment about how yours came out or even what you plan to do to help increase your conservation this year!

Be sure to check out my other blogs on Sweets 4 Dayz Blog Page for other recipes and design ideas!