Archive for: st patricks day
St Patrick’s Day isn’t a holiday that is know for its desserts or baked goods. Corned beef and cabbage are a little more likely to be what people looking to celebrate gravitate towards. But there are many delicious baked goods that are perfect for St. Pat’s, including both sweet and savory dishes, as well as those made with and without the help of a little green food coloring.
Shamrock Chocolate Peppermint Cookies (pictured) are easy to make chocolate wafer cookies topped with peppermint shamrocks, drawn with green tinted icing. I like to do a mixture of three and four leaf clovers. Eating them will make you feel a little lucky – and a little minty!
A Chocolate Stout Sheet Cake can use either Guinness – always a favorite drink for this holiday – or another chocolatey stout beer. It may not be green, but when made with Guinness it definitely has enough Irish spirit in it to work perfect for St Patrick’s Day and appease chocoholics.
Irish soda bread is a free form quick bread that can be as satisfying as any savory yeast bread – and made in less than half of the time. Traditional Irish Soda Bread is primarily flavored with buttermilk, but you can play with other flavors and make breads with oats and honey or citrus for a change of pace.
Tiramisu doesn’t sound particularly Irish (because it isn’t), but when you add a generous splash of Baileys Irish Cream, it starts to sound a lot more appropriate for St. Patrick’s Day. Baileys and Vanilla Tiramisu is a grown up dessert that is worthy of any celebration.
Green Velvet Cupcakes are a kid-friendly and very festive way to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. Start with a recipe for red velvet cupcakes or even red velvet whoopie pies and substitute green food coloring for red to get a deep green Irish-inspired color to your cake.
There are many flavors that pair well with chocolate. Coffee is one, and it is often included in chocolate cakes to bring out some of the darker notes of chocolate. Believe it or not, but dark stout is another. These dark beers often have an intense malty flavor and an almost chocolate-like profile to them, and they can enhance the bitter and malty notes that you find in dark chocolate, giving a cake a great chocolate flavor and a lot of character.
This Chocolate Stout Sheet Cake is made using a stout beer. I used a beer called Boatswain Chocolate Stout, which is actually brewed with cocoa to enhance the chocolate-like notes often found in stout beer (although it doesn’t have more than a subtle hint of cocoa to it). It is worth noting that any stout beer will do the trick in this recipe. The cake is very moist and tender, using butter, vegetable oil and yogurt in it. It has a great dark chocolate flavor to it thanks to both the beer and a generous amount of cocoa powder. You won’t taste the beer in the finished cake, but it definitely takes the edge off what would otherwise be a fairly sweet cake and gives it a grown up chocolate taste.
I topped this cake off with a Chocolate Stout Buttercream, adding a little bit of my chocolate stout beer to a simple chocolate buttercream. This introduced a distinct malty note to the frosting (again, giving it a grown-up flavor) and really tied it in well with the cake. You can leave out the beer and opt for a plain chocolate buttercream by simply adding milk to your frosting instead. This cake is also good with vanilla frosting, and is satisfying enough to eat plain – with a cup of coffee or even a glass of that chocolatey stout that you used to make it.
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A four leaf clover is good luck any day of the year, but a few clovers are an especially nice way of finishing off these St Patrick’s Day themed Shamrock Chocolate Peppermint Cookies. The cookies are tender, chocolate wafers that are topped with minty green shamrocks. They’re easy to make, flavorful and definitely look festive enough for any St Patrick’s Day celebration.
The cookies are tender and slightly soft, with a nice cocoa flavor. They’re slice-and-bake cookies, which means that the dough is rolled into a log and chilled, then sliced into rounds before baking. This approach is faster than using cookie cutters and gives the cookies a nice uniform size and shape. The cookies aren’t too sweet, so they do very well with that little bit of extra sweetness that the icing gives them to round out their flavor.
Peppermint can be a difficult flavor to work with because it is so strong. It goes well with chocolate, but it is easy for the mint to overwhelm the other flavors in a dessert if you’re not careful – and adding too little will leave you with something that lacks that peppermint punch. For these cookies, I left the peppermint out of the cookies entirely and concentrated it in the frosting. Those little green shamrocks are packed with mint flavor, adding a refreshing quality to the cookie as well as a little extra sweetness. It’s a good balance and definitely a nice way of introducing the peppermint here without it taking over the whole cookie.
You can pipe your shamrocks on using a small round piping tip, or just scrape your frosting into a ziploc bag and snip off the corner. I free-handed my clovers (three or four large dots and a line for the stem) and you don’t need to be a master piper to make it work. Be sure to let the icing dry for a couple of hours before storing the cookies, and store them in a single layer to ensure that the shamrocks don’t get smudged before you have a chance to eat them.
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Soda bread – or Irish soda bread – is an easy to make quickbread that uses baking soda as a leavening agent. What makes it different from other quickbreads is that soda bread dough is very firm and the bread is generally baked in a free-form loaf, much like yeasted breads are. The bread is very easy to make, so you can have a fresh loaf baked and ready to eat in only a few minutes, and it is easy to put your own spin on the basic recipe by adding other flavorful ingredients. A plain soda bread might contain caraway seeds or raisins. This Lemon and Walnut Soda Bread is a citrusy twist on the basic recipe, with a light lemon flavor and subtle sweetness to it.
Lemon and buttermilk is a combination that I often use in springtime baking, both in cakes and bars, and that same combination makes this loaf seem perfect for a springtime brunch. I used both lemon zest and strips of candied lemon peel to give this bread its lemon flavor. The candied peel has a sweeter, more concentrated flavor than the zest alone does and is a nice addition for lemon-lovers (although you can skip it in favor of more zest if you don’t want to make candied peel for this recipe). Walnuts have a buttery, slightly citrusy flavor that makes them a good match for the lemon in this recipe. I use untoasted walnuts, chop them into fairly large pieces and stir them in. Pecans will also work if you prefer them, and you can omit the nuts completely if you want to serve your bread as a plain lemon loaf.
This soda bread is slightly sweeter (although not very sweet) than many other soda breads and stands well on its own, or served with butter and honey. If you want to add a little extra sweetness, add a generous sprinkle of sugar to the top of the loaf before baking to give it a nice, sweet crust.
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Irish soda bread is a type of quick bread that uses baking soda as a leavener. They’re easy loaves to make because the basic recipe has just four ingredients: flour, baking soda, salt and buttermilk. This simple ingredient list also means that it is quite easy to put your own twist on the classic loaf. As much as I enjoy a plain soda bread when it is slathered with butter and jam (or used to sop up gravy after making a roast), I also like it with some variation. Raisins are a great way to sweeten up soda bread, and adding oatmeal or oat flour makes for a more tender, flavorful loaf. I usually make one big loaf and cut it into slices, but this time around I opted to make individually sized Mini Irish Soda Breads.
The mini soda breads follow the same recipe as full sized soda breads, but are baked off in small, biscuit-like portions. The dough is soft, so it can be dropped directly onto a parchment-lined baking sheet with a large spoon or scoop, rather than trying to form it into individual loaves. If you add extra flour to make the dough less sticky, your breads will be a little on the tough side.
These breads can be made plain, but I added raisins, along with dried cherries and apricots to give it a little bit of sweetness. They have a nice buttermilk flavor and, like most soda breads, are plain enough to take well to a lot of butter, jam, honey or whatever else you might be inclined to pile on. These are best served when they are fresh and still warm from the oven, so try to make them shortly before serving, whether you pan to serve them at brunch or alongside dinner.
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