Food of the Irish

I don't cook very often. The reason being that I tend to get carried away when I do. See I really love to cook, and I really love big festive dinners, and if I had my way every dinner would be a festive event.

Observe:

Guys, cupcakes were a success. Like a serious, I wanted to marry them, success. I know. We ended up making variations on the ones we'd planned. The first set were a brown sugar cake with Creme de Menthe buttercream frosting, and the second batch were Guinness cake and Bailey's Buttercream frosting. Both were out of this world! I think we ended up with about 100 cupcakes (only a slight exaggeration), so this morning I brought half of what was left over to work. They're almost all gone. I guess bringing Guinness and Bailey's cupcakes to an office filled with current and former alcoholics wasn't the best idea. But in all fairness they are pretty freaking amazing.

Gracie seemed to really like them. She usually sticks to licking off the frosting, but she actually ate her cake too.

Of course we did eat other food too. Like Corned Beef. We bought ours at Costco and I can highly reccommend theirs (I don't know if they still have any). It comes pre seasoned, but I did add a bit of parsley, ground mustard, peppercorns, and salt to the pot as it boiled. And yeah we boiled it. You can also slow cook it, but boiling took about 10 hours less. Yeah.

My pretty much amazing Colcannon. Which happens to be the easiest version of Colcannon ever. Boil your red potatoes, skin on, boil cabbage (I used a whole head), fry bacon. Mash potatoes, add salt, pepper, butter, and half & half. When the cabbage is done chop it up and add it to the potatoes. Chop up the cooked bacon and add as well. Then mix and you're done. Super easy, super yummy. You can do corned beef instead of bacon but since we were having the beef on it's own I went with bacon. I also decided to make this like I was a poor peasant Irish Woman in, like, 1798, and mixed everything with a wooden spoon. My arms are sore today. Not my best idea ever.

And Irish Soda Bread, which was kind of epic to make since Delaney made it and she hasn't really ever made bread before and so the dough was a little runny at first and she was covered in it. After a few handfulls of flour though, we were back in business and it came out super yummy! We ate ours plain with butter, but this would be so good with jam or even cheese. I really loved it.

We ended up watching Darby O'Gill and the Little People after dinner and my mom and I had Irish Cream Coffees. Overall I'd sya it was a pretty awesome night! How was your St. Patrick's Day?