Pre-Patty's Shenanigans

Each year, my boyfriend throws a huge party for St. Patrick's Day. He being an Irish-Catholic-East Coast Originating-Firefighter makes it appropriate enough, but he was also born on St. Patty's so everything falls into place quite nicely. The party is, in a word: awesome. Since we started dating, I've taken over throwing the party since I thought it was pretty lame that he had to do everything for his own birthday. This year we are in a new house, with new ideas, and ready to put previous year's parties to shame. I've been in the kitchen since 3:00 yesterday afternoon baking up a storm and dancing to Irish sea shanties. Here's what I've got so far:

I started out with the boyfriend-requested green cupcakes. My marching orders were as follows: "I don't care what flavor it is, I just want green cake." Last year I made Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes which were a smash hit, so I wanted to do something similar, but with green cake. I rooted around on Pinterest until I found a recipe for Green Velvet Cupcakes and began there. My friend Kelsey was kind enough to come over and dictate the recipe to me from my laptop while I baked those up.  We determined that the 1 tablespoon of cocoa that the recipe called for was not enough, so we added 3. The additional cocoa darkened the color to baby poop green rather than shamrock green, but the flavor was much improved by it.
The end result looked like this:


I stuck a baby spoon my sister left here into the still hot cupcakes to make a well which I would later fill with whiskey ganache. (recipe below) For the evening those were set aside to cool.













Next I made the whiskey ganache, which is my own recipe modified from the days of working at my parent's bakery. It's super simple, alcoholic, and delicious!
Ingredients:
2 Cups Heavy Whipping Cream
2 Cups Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
    (I use Ghiradelli because I'm a snob about my chocolate)
1 cup of whiskey


Step 1: Heat the heavy cream on the stove until boiling, stirring constantly to keep from burning
Step 2: Remove from heat, add chocolate chips. Stir until chocolate chips are melted and the sauce is smooth.
Step 3: Set aside for a couple of hours and allow the ganache to cool.
Step 4: Add whiskey, stir until it is totally mixed in. At this point it will look like chocolate-whiskey soup. That's normal.
Step 5: Allow to sit overnight, uncovered at room temperature. The next morning it should be a smooth, shiny, thick chocolate sauce. Theoretically, it should thicken even more over time, but I've never let it sit long enough to find out.


That's it! I don't add the whiskey to the hot mixture because I don't want to lose any of the alcohol to the heat. A few recipes I've found call for 2 or 3 tablespoons of whiskey, but I found that you can't taste it. With a cup of whiskey, the cupcake packs a flavorful punch and falls under one of my many rules of life: "There's no such thing as too much whiskey."

This morning I filled the wells of the cupcakes with the ganache:

After filling, I like to let them sit for a while so the ganache has a chance to harden up before I put the irish cream frosting on top. This makes for some of the most time consuming cupcakes ever made, but it's worth it.

The irish cream frosting is even more simple than the ganache, and just as delicious..
Ingredients:
1 stick of butter, room temp
2 cups of powdered sugar
About 1/4 cup of irish cream

Throw it all in a mixer and whip until it is the desired consistency. Add more irish cream to make it softer and more powdered sugar to make it drier.

The end result looked like this:

It has taken me all day to cook, clean, and write this blog post... So I will post more tomorrow after the party!
-Jess