St. Patrick's Day (03/17)

At the last minute, during my 30 minute lunch break to be exact, I decided that we should do something to celebrate St. Patty's Day. I found a corned beef and cabbage recipe on Food Network and a cupcake recipe on Better Homes and Gardens. The corned beef recipe was from Paula Deen, who I love, and had the word easy in the title, which I also love, so I gave Nic a grocery list and we planned to attempt our first St. Patty's meal.

Nic got to the grocery store and took one look at the canned corned beef and said no way! He said it looked liked spam and got corned beef hash instead (which I have always thought looks like dog food). When he got home I was a little disappointed we were going to have to attempt the recipe without the ingredients the recipe called for, but I was still optimistic that it would taste good. (I was putting a lot of faith in Paula because canned corned beef and hash has always sounded gross to me).

We began to make the cabbage, which looked and smelled delicious and followed Paula's printed out directions exactly. It was when we added the corned beef hash that things went down hill quickly! What we should have done since we were both so unsure of the canned corned beef hash is that we should have cooked it seperately. Unfortunatly, we didnt! The corned beef hash got all mushy, didn't cook and just became this huge sloppy mess! I am really bummed neither of us tried the cabbage because we ended up ruining the meal! We were so confused that it went so horribly wrong so we watched the video Paula had put up and realized that the printed recipe was wrong! :( We didn't even have a chance. Needless to say I will not be attempting to make anything with canned corned beef or hash ever! I think next year I will make a real corned beef in the crock pot and I will give the cabbage portion of Paula's recipe another try because it did look and smell really good.

While Nic drove to McDonalds to get us dinner :/ I finished up with the cupcakes. Thankfully we had better luck with them. They were mint cupcakes with a white chocolate frosting. The cupcakes were pretty good, but not minty enough for me and after the emotinally draining dinner attempt I wasn't feeling up to making the white chocolate frosting from scratch. Instead I grabbed one of the many vanilla frosting tubs I keep on hand and added mint extract to it. Since I cheated on the making of the frosting I decided to get a bit fancier with the decorating. I got out my cake decorator pen that has been begging to be used since I got it as a wedding gift and tried out some decorating. I think for my first time they turned out pretty cute. :)