Mother’s tactics to ensure you got your five-a-day: airplane fork tricks, making food faces on your plate and threatening to deny you dessert.

These days we can have our cake and eat our veggies, too.

Petit Pois cupcakes may taste sinfully sweet, but the new gluten- and lactose-free range — launching today — is made using grated pumpkin, courgette or beetroot instead of butter. (The vegetables soften rather than stiffen over time, meaning the cakes stay moist longer.)

Chef Harry Eastwood and partner Ashley Maddox flavour the chocolate, vanilla, lemon and orange desserts with 70 per cent coco, real vanilla beans or unwaxed citrus. (Sugar is minimal and found mostly in the thin layer of icing.) What’s more: the 175-calorie treats taste as good as regular cupcakes.

Take that, mushy peas.

Available at Selfridges, 400 Oxford Street, W1A 1AB (08001 234000 or petitpoiscakes.com), £5 for two. Eastwood and Maddox will be giving out free cakes today from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. in the food hall.

Photo: Courtesy of Petit Pois