For a lunch at the construction site I’m working on, I contributed some cupcakes.

The cupcake collage shows a prairie dog colony on the bottom right, silt fence going through, wetlands, and a stream. 

The Silt Fence was made out of fruit leather on toothpicks.

Wetlands were used using green buttercream and a grass tip.

The light colored dirt is graham crackers and the dark colored dirt in the prairie dog mounds is a mixture of oreo cookies and graham crackers.

The prairie dog heads were each sculpted out of brown marshmallow fondant.  Their eyes and nose/mouth were hand painted on using airbrush colors.

What was inside the cupcakes?

The cupcakes were triple chocolate fudge from Betty Crocker.  I followed the recipe on the box but reduced the amount of water slightly but added a big dollap of sour cream and mini chocolate chips.  I found that mini chocolate chips work better in cupcakes than the ghardelli chocolate chips that tend to be too large for a cupcake.

I filled the cupcakes with chocolate whipped cream.  To make the chocolate whipped cream, I used the Cocoa Whipped Icing recipe at Wilton.com but added 1/4 cup of Piping Gel to stabilize it.

For the icing, I used Kay’s Cream Cheese Icing Recipe  but used 1 tsp of Orange Extract instead of the Butter Extract.  This made a nice chocolate orange flavor for the cupcake.

The cupcakes were a big hit with the construction guys.  They loved the flavor and the decorations!!