Down the cakehole: vegetable cakes

The mighty carrot cake is under threat from a box of rebel cupcakes with secret ingredients. Part of a new range made by the Paris-based baking business, Petis Pois, these cupcakes have no glitter, no butter, no great mound of sickly icing, last for five days and measure in at a mere 175 calories each.

What's the secret? Vegetables, apparently. Zany cake maker Harry Eastwood and her co-founder, Ashley Maddox, have launched a new range of gooey gluten-free cupcakes made up of 54 per cent vegetable. Flavours include vanilla and courgette, orange and pumpkin, lemon and courgette and chocolate and beetroot, and arrive in Selfridges on March 15 (£5/two cakes, petitpoiscakes.com). Some will have tried Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe for courgette and lime cake while Delicious magazine's Angela Boggiano knows how to whip up half a dozen delicious courgette muffins but this is the first time vegetable cake baking has gone mainstream.

Wanting to resolve the problem of unhealthy cake making, Eastwood experimented with a range of ingredients: "You have to be a bit Willy Wonka about which flavours you pair with which vegetable - some vegetables enhance the flavours they're with, such as parsnip and ginger, for example.

"I took a bit of a gamble and came up with the beetroot chocolate fudge cake. You can't taste the beetroot yet the moisture levels as well as the general gooey, gungeyness were much better than any other cake I'd made and it was much healthier," she says.

You saw it here first: carrots are so last season.