St. Patricks Day

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. 🙂

It’s almost St. Patty’s Day!!! Since it falls on a Saturday this year I figure most people will be too blasted all day to bother reading my blog, so I decided to share my St. Patrick’s Day cookies a wee bit in advance! But first, a little music to set the mood from my favorite Irish band – Flogging Molly!

Okay. So, I had grand plans for shamrock cookies and pots o’ gold and I’m happy to say everything turned out better than I had hoped!! I even got some props and whatnot so I could take snazzier pictures than my standard fare of snapping shots of cookies just lying forlorn on my dining room table.

As you can see, I did not have a black icing disaster this time! To read about when I did – click here! I was a little worried at first, because when I mixed up the icing it looked more gray than black but I let it sit for a while and it darkened up nicely. The pots came out perfect!!

I ended up having to make a second batch the other night because people who saw the first set just couldn’t resist and had to have some for themselves. This time around I had a NEW black icing disaster! I made the icing the same exact way that I did the first batch, and then left the cookies to dry overnight. To my absolute horror when I checked on them the next day I discovered that a number of them had become splotchy looking. I freaked out. Were they wet, moldy, infected with cookie pox?!?!

After a brief internet search I learned it was most likely due to humidity. It had been pretty humid the night I iced the cookies even though it’s not even Spring yet! (Strange weather these days, earthquakes, locusts, cookie pestilence…those Mayans might be on to something) Anyway, there was nothing to do but work with it!! So I wrote on the damn things.

I should have taken a picture of the splotches so you could see what I’m talking about, but I was in no mood for documentation. Trust me though, under that writing lurks dark spots. I think it was a nice cover. No one has to know, except everyone reading this right now. You won’t tell, right? ; )

I hope everyone has a fun St. Patrick’s Day! Time to start plotting for Easter…