How to Make This Cute Succulent Cupcake Kit For Your Favorite Gardener

I wanted to design a Succulent Cupcake kit that I could send someone that would include everything they need to make these cute succulent cupcakes. They would only need to add perishables and liquid items like Butter, oil, milk, eggs, and vanilla flavoring.

The Succulent Cupcake Decorating Kit I built contained: 2 Cookie boxes with confetti and Succulent Cupcake Toppers, Simply Baked Petite Baking Cups, Oreo Dirt, 2 Piping bags, Dry ingredients for Chocolate cupcakes, Dry ingredients for chocolate buttercream frosting, Recipe directions for cupcakes and frosting, Certificate to list contents of kit and make a good gift presentation.

I made Succulent Cupcake Toppers to place in the kit. Please take a look at How to Make Succulent Cupcake Toppers to see how I did this.

Here’s how I packed the succulents for shipping.

I wrapped each succulent in plastic wrap. 

Here’s one wrapped up.

Here’s how I packed them in the box.  

 

I put the Succulents into a Cookie boxand surrounded them with crinkle cut packing material to keep them from breaking in transit. I packed it with purple crinkle cut shredded paper similar to this red crinkle paper.

I covered them with more crinkle paper and packed more crinkle paper in the box so that nothing shifted when the box was moved around. Now this is the finished succulent box for the Succulent Cupcake Kit.

I then covered this box in foil coated bubble wrap to better protect it.

The toppers I made were about 1 to 1 1/2 inches in diameter so I wanted to get small cups for mini cupcakes and I wanted cups that did not require a cupcake pan.  

I purchased these Simply Baked Petite Baking Cups which were about the size of a shot glass to make mini cupcakes.

They worked really well and looked great with the succulent cupcake toppers I made. I recommend eating with a fork. If you take the cupcake paper off, the dirt starts to spill everywhere.

 I included a disposable pastry bag to pipe the frosting onto the cupcakes. 

I crushed the cookies part of Oreo cookies in a food processor to produce dirt. I included a bag of ‘dirt’ in the kit.

I saw how to make fudge rocks that I liked on Hungry Happenings.  I made fudge rocks using white fudge that I made from a different recipe that used sour cream and had to be cooked. I was shipping in the hot summer heat and I did not want the fudge to melt.  Cook fudge is not supposed to melt under 240 degrees and I wasn’t sure about uncooked fudge. The fudge turned out really well. Once it cooled about an hour, I put the fudge into 4 separate bowls.  Bowl 1 had a lot of crushed oreos with added fudge. Bowl 2 had a smalll amount of crushed oreos with added fudge. Bowl 3 had some cocoa powder with added fudge and bowl 4 was just plain white fudge.

I made tiny rocks by combining pieces from different bowls to give each rock a unique look and coloration.  I did not fully mix the different ones because I wanted different color shades in my rocks.  Each rock had a slightly different shape.  I made them fairly small to fit into the shot glass sized cups with the Succulent.

Here’s a picture of the contents of the kit I put together. Each succulent box contained 10 succulents. I included enough supplies to make 10 cupcakes at two different times. I wrapped the fudge rocks in foil bubble wrap just after this picture was taken.

I packed and shipped everything in a medium flat rate Priority Mail box. It just barely fit.  

When the kit is received, this is what it will look like. I put in 2 cupcake dry ingredients, 2 chocolate buttercream dry ingredients, 20 petite baking cups, Oreo cookie dirt, cookies and cream fudge rocks, and  2 piping bags. 

Here a copy of certificates that I put in the top of the kit. The certificate described the kit as a birthday present and listed all the pieces. The next document told how to prepare the cupcakes. The last document gave a sample picture of the finished product so the person would know what they were creating.  

Once the lucky person opens the kit, they can make and assemble the cupcakes in these easy steps.

Use recipe provided. Take out ingredients and preheat the oven about 45 minutes before making cupcakes so ingredients will be at room temperature.   Add water, butter, oil, and eggs to the dry cupcake ingredients provided and mix together to make the cupcake batter. 

I used Liz Merek’s Sculpted Chocolate Cake Recipe customized to 1 pound of batter to make the cupcakes. That should make about 10 of these mini cupcakes. Any leftover batter can be baked in a different pan.

Spoon about 1 1/2 Tablespoons into the cups to fill each just at 1/2 full. This will leave room to put in frosting, dirt, rocks, and succulent.

Bake on a baking pan in a preheated oven at 335 degrees for 16-18 minutes until they spring back when pressed lightly on the top. No muffin pan is needed because the cups are sturdy enough to bake in.

This is the baked cupcake.

Make the frosting by combining the dry ingredients for the frosting with butter and milk or cream. Place in the provided piping bag. 

Use scissors to cut a 1/4 inch hole in the end of the piping bag.

Pipe frosting onto the cupcake and smooth out with the tip of the bag.  

You can also just spread with a knife or spatula if you had rather.

Place dirt onto the frosting. Pat down gently with a spoon and gently shake off any excess and save for another cupcake.

Place the rocks and the succulent in the pot and Enjoy! 

Here’s the finished cupcakes. Everything is edible and looks great too.  Just snap off any parts of the spaghetti you do not want to eat.