Thanks for the quick response @nik9000! I did read about that plug-in a couple days ago but decided to try the embedded path for two main reasons, both are related to debugging. Solr's MiniSolrCloudCluster allows you to debug your test including stepping into Solr's code and understanding why a test fails. This is most valuable as sometimes (well most of the times) it reveals a bug in my test/code, but some times it also reveals a bug in Solr.
Another reason is that it's just easier to run a test from an IDE (Eclipse in my case), add debug print statements, stepping through own code, than running a test in Maven.
I still hope to manage getting the embedded case to work, mostly for the above reasons (but also since now it has become a challenge that I must solve! 
). If it won't work though, I'll explore the Maven plug-in option.