Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

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 espress...

 It's a good thing everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's day because we love to celebrate. We decorate a little bit and I set the table with a festive shamrock tablecloth. As I get older and more family members are missing I find that I enjoy these low-key smaller holidays more than days like Christmas, New Years or, God forbid, birthdays.  This year our menu included Guinness beef stew, sauteed green cabbage and potato "farls". Dessert was Chocolate Guinness cupcakes with Guinness buttercream . I used this recipe  from Sally's Baking Addiction and I'm just going to go ahead and say that they were absolutely scrumptious. I wish could have eaten several!  The recipe calls for reducing most of a bottle of Guinness to use in the batter and the frosting. That was my first time reducing beer, and with this kind of stout it made for a bit of a bitter reduction but of course once coupled with all the brown sugar in the batter they balanced each other out wonderfully...