Former Favorites: Vegetable Garden Cupcakes

Having had a few baking successes within the last several months, I decided to go ahead and document them here. (In other words, if I can't be in the kitchen tonight, I can at least take a little time off from homework to add a post or two... right?)

First up are the vegetable garden cupcakes. These were my project for my mom's birthday this summer, and I couldn't imagine a better way to make chocolate cake and chocolate frosting more "healthy". Inspiration goes back more than a decade to a vegetable garden cake that Martha Stewart featured on her show--as I recall, it was the cake that mom and I made for my 9th (or 10th?) birthday. The original recipe called for marzipan vegetables--our attempts with that failed, so we used frosting (meticulously piped by mom). For the cupcakes all these years later, I decided to play around with fondant. Decidedly fun!