Kiss Me I'm Irish!

So I love St. Patrick's Day- not just because of the green beer but because I'm Irish and it means another holiday that I can bake for!  I do like the beer though, don't get me wrong.  I am from Wisconsin with some of the best beer.  Since I am currently in New York, I guess I will focus on the baking.  My sister is a first grade teacher in Wisconsin and I always try to find something fun to send her class each year.  I realized a couple weeks ago that I hadn't sent anything yet but was happy to think that St. Patrick's Day was coming up soon.  Sure, I could've just done Easter but was excited about having a fun activity to send with the treats.  I got a great idea from SomethingShinyBlog on her St. Patrick's Extravaganza post.  I decided to make green velvet cake pops and sugar cookie shamrocks.

Green velvet cake pops

These were such a cute idea and they turned out great!  I just made green velvet cake with cream cheese frosting then dipped it in white and green chocolate candy melt chips.  I had picked up awesome sprinkles that have white regular sprinkles and green shamrock sprinkles.  They are sooo cute.  I mixed and matched and put some on each of the white and green chocolate.

They turned out pretty cute, huh? 

Inside of the green velvet cake pops

They turned out so green on the inside.  I was so excited.  I think the first graders will love that the inside is green.  I know when I was a kid, I loved coloring all of my food (heck, I still do!).  That's another great thing about St. Patrick's Day.  My mom's friend has always dyed her entire gallon of milk green each year and I think that is just too fun!

Sugar Cookie Cutout Shamrocks with Royal Icing 

My next item was cookies.  Kids always love cookies.  I had never flooded with royal icing before.  I definitely need some practice and I definitely over whipped the royal icing.  I know a lot of taste testers who will not mind me practicing more.  So I baked the cookies, waited for them to cool, and outlined the cookies in typical Irish colors: dark green, orange, white, and I threw in light green too.

After the outlines dried, I tried to flood the cookies.  I don't think I put enough icing on each for them to actually be flooded but they turned out cute enough.  I will definitely need to make the icing more liquidy next time.  Once the flooded part was dry I was able to make all the fun designs.  Those really made the cookies!  

Taste testing was next and man were both the cookies and cake pops tasty.  I could've eaten all of them. Fortunately, since I'm not swimming anymore I had to send the majority of them to my sister's class and extras for her friends.  She said if there were extra after that, she might give one each to my mom and dad.  I'm glad I finally get to post these pictures because the package arrived today just in time for tomorrow.  To send them out, I package each one individually.  The cookies got shamrock plastic bags and the cake pops got clear bags with either a green or white ribbon (green went with the white pops, white went with the green pops).  I forgot to take pictures of the completely finished product.  I hope you enjoy these and they inspire you to make your own.  I know my mom tried them out over the weekend and they looked great.

Look forward to next week-  a fun surprise in the works!

Till next time, happy baking!

Kaitlin