St. Patrick's Day Cupcakes

Happy (almost) St. Patrick's Day! I was at Sur La Table looking for green decorations and found a cute green glitter pen and some green glitter sprinkles, so I decided to use them to decorate St. Patrick's Day cupcakes. I saw that Bakerella (dessert goddess)used a red velvet recipe and replaced the red dye with green to create green cupcakes. Easy enough right?

(awkward silence)

Umm....that did not work for me. I used my own recipe for red velvet cupcakes and just tried changing the dye. Well, apparently, I needed a lot more green dye because I used an entire bottle of green gel dye, and my cupcakes STILL sort of looked more like mud.

Here is what happened:

They started off like this...


But then once I added the cocoa/flour mixture, they turned into a horrible green mud color, and I was completely out of dye at that point.



Although, they kind of looked like chocolate when cooked...either way, it was not the look I was going for.



So anyway, my recommendation is to find a basic white cupcake recipe(or box mix) and plan to use a lot of green dye. At least, it still tasted delicious. More importantly, the cream cheese icing was amazing, so it was only a semi-failure. I am not going to bother showing how to make mud cupcake batter, but I will show you how I made the cream cheese icing.

Here is what you will need:




Step 1: Beat butter and cream cheese until fluffy, 3-4 minutes.



Step 2: Add sugar, 1 cup at a time, and then vanilla; mix until smooth.





Now time to decorate!

Step 1: Frost the cupcakes.



Step 2: Using the gel pen, create the outline of the shamrock (three hearts attached at the stem).


Step 3: Fill in the outline.



Enjoy!



Full list of ingredients:
Green glitter gel pen (edible, of course)
Green sprinkles
2 sticks of unsalted butter (room temperature)
12 ounces of cream cheese (room temperature)
4 cups/1 lb. powdered sugar
3/4 tsp. vanilla