St. Patrick’s Day Cupcakes

March 14, 2014March 13, 2014 ~ Angela ~ 4 Comments

Are you looking for a easy, but totally festive dessert to make for St. Patrick’s Day? Look no further!!

Take a white boxed cake mix and prepare according to the directions on the box. Before baking, add orange food coloring or gel paste until you reach the desired shade. After the cupcakes have baked and cooled, whip up a batch of your favorite vanilla frosting (here’s mine!). Pipe frosting onto cupcakes and garnish with the green candies of your choice. I used Mint M&M’s, but you could just pick out the green ones from a plain bag, use Skittles, green Sixlets or even jellybeans since they are already popping up in the stores.

If you prefer a more liquid St. Paddy’s Day treat I have a few cocktails for you to check out! There’s the Whipped Popsicle (it’s the perfect shade of green!), Summer Green Sangria, and the Drunken Irish Potato! Everyone have fun and remember to drink responsibly this St. Patrick’s Day. That means that for every cocktail you drink, you should also have a cupcake!

Spiked Irish Potatoes

March 10, 2014March 9, 2014 ~ Angela ~ 16 Comments

Hi everyone! Sorry I have been MIA for the past two months! In addition to this being the WORST winter weather-wise (seriously, 3rd snowiest winter in Philadelphia – I think I have spent half the past two months just shoveling my driveway!), this has also been a very bad start to 2014 on a personal level. Hence, my disappearing act. Things are better now though, and with St. Patrick’s Day right around the corner I am hoping a bit of the Luck o’ the Irish will get everyone through the rest of this winter unscathed! In order to facilitate said luck, I made some Irish Potatoes and added an extra special ingredient – booze (I know, no surprise there right?)!

If you aren’t from around here you may not be aware of these delightful confections. I am obviously not talking about those spuds that grow in the ground. I am talking cream cheese, powdered sugar, coconut flakes and cinnamon. They are a traditional Philadelphia candy that look like little potatoes, and are especially popular this time of year. There is absolutely nothing Irish about them. 🙂

Until last year when I shared my Drunken Irish Potato cocktail recipe, I had no idea that people outside of the Philadelphia area may have never experienced the sweet perfection of these little treats. So this year I am making it my mission to get everyone acquainted with my little spuddy buddy, the Irish Potato.

These couldn’t be any easier to make and the taste payoff is beyond worth the minimal effort! You just mix all the ingredients together in a bowl, roll the mixture into little balls or potato shapes and then cover them in cinnamon! And then you spend the rest of the night sneaking into the fridge to grab “just one more” and furtively wiping the traces of cinnamon from your fingers. Or maybe that’s just me…

Spiked Irish Potatoes (adapted from Irish Potato Candy submitted to Allrecipes.com by Saundra)

Ingredients

1/4 cup butter, softened
1/2 of an 8 oz. package of cream cheese
4 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 tablespoon Malibu Coconut Rum OR 1 tablespoon RumChata OR 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups flaked coconut
ground cinnamon

Directions

In a medium bowl, beat together the butter and cream cheese until smooth. Add the liquor of your choice (or vanilla extract if you don’t want to use alcohol) and confectioners’ sugar, one cup at a time, beating until smooth. Mix in the coconut flakes – I used my hands! – and then chill the mixture for about 20 minutes in the refrigerator. Pour a few tablespoons of ground cinnamon into a small bowl. Once the mixture has chilled, roll into small balls or potato shapes and then coat in the cinnamon. Place onto a cookie sheet and chill to set.

The addition of the coconut rum just enhances the coconut flavor in the Malibu potatoes, and the RumChata potatoes were slightly creamier with a hint of vanilla. These aren’t overwhelmingly boozy the way rum balls at Christmastime can be.

These are fun to make, and even more fun to eat! If you leave out the booze these are definitely an easy St. Patty’s Day treat that kids can help whip up; their little hands are perfect for shaping these bite sized spuds! If you have never had an Irish Potato before, give these a try and let me know what you think! I’d love to hear from any first-timers out there!

If you agree that the combination of creamy coconut and cinnamon is as awesome as I think it is, try out my liquid version – the Drunken Irish Potato!

The Cocktail at the End of the Rainbow

March 13, 2013July 26, 2013 ~ Angela ~ 6 Comments

Today I bring to you a multipurpose libation.

With St. Patrick’s Day right around the corner, I am sure many of you are looking for a good green cocktail. Usually if an alcoholic drink is green it contains one of two things: green creme de menthe, or melon liquor. I have nothing against either flavor, but if you are looking for something a little different you have come to the right place!

Remember Little Hugs? Tiny barrels of sugar laden “fruit drink”…ahhh, childhood. Well, the lemon-lime flavor is the perfect shade of green to make a lovely St. Patrick’s day drink while steering clear of the usual suspects. I mixed it up with Pinnacle Whipped Vodka and some Sierra Mist. Before I tried a sip, I named it the Whipped Leprechaun.

After I tried a sip, I realized I had something on my hands that transcended March 17th. This thing tasted like one of those popsicles that I spent my summers slurping down as a kid. You know, the ones with the cream inside? I renamed it the Whipped Popsicle. Don’t want to box myself in you know.

This drink is perfect to celebrate St. Patty’s Day with or to sip by the pool come summertime, and I know from all the Facebook and Pinterest posts I’ve been seeing lately that a bunch of you are already thinking summer.

Whipped Popsicle

2 oz Pinnacle Whipped Vodka
Lemon-lime Little Hugs drink
Lemon-lime soda of your choice

Add vodka to glass. Fill 3/4 of the glass with the lemon-lime Little Hugs drink, and then top off with lemon-lime soda. Stir, add ice, consume (unless you are under 21 – in that case just go eat a popsicle and come back when you’re old enough!)

Drunken Irish Potato

March 8, 2013February 28, 2014 ~ Angela ~ 13 Comments

I know St. Patrick’s Day is still a little over a week away but I had to share this with you now so you have time to go out and buy the ingredients to make this yourself. You will thank me.

Every now and then I have a flash of semi-brilliance. Why this occurs when I am staring at my collection of liquor bottles and not when I am facing down a Statistics exam, I will never know. (Seriously, what crackhead made up statistics?)

Anyway, as I was waiting for the timer to go off on the cookies I am baking for Operation Cookie Takeover (more on that later) I stood staring at my booze shelf (okay, shelves) and thinking about how I wanted to make an Irish Potato cocktail. All of the recipes I had found contained Baileys Irish Cream, coconut rum or vodka, and cinnamon schanpps or Goldschlager. Meatloaf says two out of three ain’t bad, but my lack of the cinnamon booze was not going to make me an Irish Potato cocktail.

Then I saw my bottle of Rumchata. I thought to myself, Not only does it have a lovely cinnamon flavor – it has the PERFECT cinnamon flavor! Synapses firing, I got to work at mixing up this Irish beauty…

The Drunken Irish Potato

2 oz Rumchata
1 oz Parrot Bay Coconut Rum
2 oz Baileys Irish Cream
ice

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker, shake, drink, make another!

If you are having a St. Patrick’s Day party you should definitely serve this, and if you are hitting the bars – tell the bartender how to make this (and feel free to direct them to my blog for more fabulous ideas!). If you are going to drink nothing but beer, I don’t understand you, but have fun anyway. All of you, take a cab home.

Do Irish Potatoes Count As A Vegetable?

March 7, 2013March 2, 2014 ~ Angela ~ 9 Comments

St. Patrick’s Day is right around the corner. That means it’s time for green beer, four leaf clovers and Irish Potatoes! I don’t drink beer, green or otherwise, and I’m completely lacking in the luck department, but holiday candy? I’m all over it!

Cream cheese, coconut, confectioners sugar, cinnamon… I was thinking the other day that these flavors would make a good drink. I found a bunch of recipes and plan on trying a few (has anyone ever had an Irish Potato cocktail???). After I did some research on drinkable versions of this little treat I go to thinking that I should also make an Irish Potato cupcake.

For the most part I am not yet brave enough to completely make up a recipe on my own, so for these cupcakes I combined two different recipes that I found online. I made the cinnamon cupcake recipe from Duncan Hines’ Snickerdoodle Cupcakes and topped the cupcakes with a Coconut Cream Cheese Frosting recipe from Allrecipes.com.

These were good, but they didn’t quite capture the flavor of the Irish Potato candy. Even though I added extra cinnamon to the cupcake batter, they were nowhere near cinnamon-y enough. The frosting was good, but the cream cheese flavor was definitely the most prevalent. If I were to attempt these cupcakes a second time I would cut the cream cheese down just a bit, add more confectioners sugar and definitely add more coconut extract.

Or maybe I would try this recipe that I just found…. It has an Irish Potato stuffed in the cupcake! My only problem would be trying not to eat all the Irish Potatoes before I got around to sticking them into the cupcakes. 🙂