St. Patrick's Day Cake

St. Patrick's day shamrock cake

All year I've been thinking about the Guinness cupcakes with Guinness buttercream from last year. One good thing about time flying, soon it was time to make the recipe from Sally's Baking Addiction's blog.

I did want a change, though, so it was a perfect opportunity to use my shamrock cake pan. I purchased it over 10 years ago and had only used it once before!  Since it's silicone, this pan comes with a metal holder that it nestles into, and the holder has a handle on each side to help put the pan in and out of the oven. It's also a beautiful shade of Kelly green.  

Shamrock cake pan

Lately I've been wary of silicone, so I lined the bottom of the pan with parchment paper.  The recipe, which is for16 cupcakes, yielded just the right amount of batter to fit in the pan!  I placed the filled pan onto a bakers sheet to make it even easier to put into the oven.

The only change I made to the recipe was leaving out the espresso powder, since I didn't have any in the house.

It took almost 30 minutes for the center of the cake to be fully baked. The "leaves" of the shamrock did get a little dry, but I don't see how you could avoid it with this pan, unless you baked the whole thing at a lower temperature for longer.  I had a feeling this would be the case, but I needed to get this bake done quickly, since I was making the rest of our St. Patrick's dinner at the same time.

The buttercream from this recipe is what really "made" the cupcakes last year.  It is that good!  This year, however, I made the buttercream from Handle the Heat's recipe. I chose to do this because the original recipe is a chocolate buttercream, and I wanted the cake to be white with green piping. Also, I didn't have enough reduced Guinness or espresso powder. Handle the Heat's recipe only calls for 3 cups of confectioner's sugar, as opposed to the usual 4-5.  Because of this, it yields quite a bit less buttercream. I only had enough to frost the cake and pipe a border, but that is all I needed. 

To decorate the cake, I made a fondant pot of gold with a rainbow going into it. I drew this out by hand, rolled out some fondant, and cut it with a fondant blade and a knife. I then colored the topper with diluted food coloring. However, I didn't dilute the black food coloring for the pot, to make it really stand out. It still dried quickly enough to handle it.  I colored the "gold" area using Lemon Yellow and once it was dry I pressed a Wilton #10 piping tip into the fondant to make the "gold coins". I was pretty satisfied with the result!  Here is the handmade fondant topper, drying on a paper towel:

"Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow" decoration

To finish decorating the cake, I piped a green border around the shamrock using a Wilton #1M tip. I placed the topper in the center of the cake and added a rainbow of sprinkles going into the topper. I'm not sure if this was a good idea, since the sprinkles I had at hand are pastel colored, and the rainbow is painted with bright colors. But it was too late to back out, and the cake was just for us, so overall I was happy with it.

This year for St. Patrick's Day dinner we had corned beef with potatoes, turnips, carrots and cabbage. The corned beef came out just right, after simmering 2.5 hours, and the vegetables, which were cooked separately, were also good.  We enjoyed it and we hope to have good luck for the rest of 2024. ☘




 

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