The Kelly Green Clover

With a blog named The Kelly Green Clover, it'd be a total shame if I didn't make an update today! It doesn't take much to figure out that I am indeed Irish, and my family used to celebrate this holiday by pub-hopping through downtown Dallas and coming home to a dinner of corned beef and cabbage. This year, we just stuck with the corned beef and cabbage dinner. I busied myself with my project of the day: St. Patrick's Day dessert!


Guiness chocolate cake... with Irish Cream Frosting! Talk about decadence! I got both recipes from Smitten Kitchen. Her version was cupcakes, which was quite tempting...but I wanted to make this into a cake project.

The top looks a bit like a pint of Guinness, doesn't it? I didn't really mean for that to be the effect...but I guess that it's pretty fitting, considering the ingredients of the cake!



The basket-weave was hastily-done, and the runny/thin consistency of the icing made it pretty difficult to accomplish. Definitely a note to self: basket-weave needs stiffer icing than this!







The design was inspired by Irish china known as Belleek. My grandmother had a whole bunch of this stuff, and passed a few pieces on to my mom. I've grown up seeing this delicate-looking china around my house, and always thought it was very pretty. As you can see, the basket-weave is a very common motif in Belleek. Not all Belleek has it, but a lot of it does.

Alright, so that was my day in a nutshell! Well, in a cake. My family hasn't torn into this cake yet, but I'm looking forward to it! Mmmm.


UPDATE: Cake was good! Frosting was a little too sweet (see: Liam's Rejected Frosting)