9 Delightful Garden Cakes

This is a difficult time of year for avid gardeners. March is so close you can see it on the calendar, and some plants are beginning to sprout, but you know it will be some time before you can really get outside and run your hands through the topsoil. To get you through these last few weeks before spring, you might want to try baking a garden in your kitchen! Here are some lovely cakes fashioned after Mother Earth's bounty.

1. Flower Garden Cake with Worms

Redditor Mehlforwarding made this cake for his four-year-old daughter's birthday. He took a store-bought cake, iced it with chocolate frosting, trimmed ladyfinger cookies to make the fence, sprinkled the cake with crushed Oreo cookies, and made the flowers out of squashed gumdrops and toothpicks. The instructions say "Allow gummy worms to run free."  You can also follow the directions from Spoonful.

2. Vegetable Garden Cake

Photo credit: Flickr user Abbey Hendrickson.

Abbey Hendrickson made this vegetable garden cake for her son's first birthday party. The veggies are cake, too, made with a Garden Cakelets pan from Williams-Sonoma. It appears the company no longer sells the pan.  

3. Flower Garden with Butterflies

This lovely garden of flowers from redditor thetourist85 is made of buttercream frosting. The fence is made from Cadbury Fingers, and the butterflies and flowers were made from royal icing, then painted with edible color.

4. Carrot Pound Cake

This cake is thoroughly realistic, because carrots always come from the garden with plenty of dirt! In this case, that dirt is crushed cookies. Kendra at Stop Lookin' Get Cookin. made the carrots from wedges of frozen pound cake dipped in colored chocolate. The full instructions are posted so you can make your own carrot crop.

5. Roly-poly Garden Cake

This garden birthday cake came from a bakery, but the roly-poly bugs on top were homemade, because Madeline thought roly-poly bugs were awesome. The making of the bugs out of fondant was a family project that the kids really enjoyed -and it made them all proud of the finished cake!   

6. Vegetable Garden Cupcakes

Photo credit: Flickr user kikiduck.

Carrie made garden cupcakes with various vegetables and even little garden signs! Iced cupcakes were topped with crushed Oreo "cookie dirt." The vegetables were shaped from Tootsie rolls of different colors, with frosting for leaves. The pea pods have green M&Ms tucked inside! The signs are made of graham crackers dipped in chocolate. You can see a series of photographs featuring closeups of the details in her Flicker set.

7. Hippo Bath Cake

Photo credit: Flickr user Ken's Oven.

A hippo takes a bath outside in a wooden tub among the garden flowers! Ken's Oven made this cute cake for a friend's birthday. Inside all those decorations is a lemon rum cake with almonds. Yum!

8. Chickens Ate My Garden Cake

The boss told a story of how chickens ate up her garden. When the boss's birthday came around, redditor Professor_Who recalled the story in cake form. The cake is chocolate fudge with Oreo cookies inside; the chickens and vegetables are fondant.

9. Stuffed Carrot Garden Cupcakes

Photo credit: Flickr user 1 Fine Cookie.

This looks like carrots growing out of flowerpots. But since you know this list is about cakes, you might be forgiven for thinking they are carrot cakes. These are actually strawberries, stuffed with carrot cake crumbs, coated with melted colored white chocolate, and plunged into cupcakes baked in flowerpots. The leaves? Oh, those are from real carrots! Jasmin has the complete instructions at 1 Fine Cookie.