Saint Patrick’s Day Cupcakes
Planning out your menu for the feast of Saint Patrick? Try out these authentically Catholic – and unbelievably easy! – Saint Patrick’s Day cupcakes!
Saint Patrick’s Day has become such a secularized holiday so we wanted to emphasize the fact that it’s a feast of canonized saint….which is why we picked to decorate the cupcakes with a shamrock, the three-leafed plant Saint Patrick used to teach of the Trinity.
This project is incredibly simply and straightforward…and is great for all skill levels!
You will need:
-a batch of cupcakes
-frosting
-green food coloring
-tootsie rolls and fruit chews
-white candy melts or white chocolate
-mini pretzel sticks
For this project, we tackled the shamrock cupcake toppers first since they have to cool and harden. Start by heating up your candy melts. You can heat this in a glass dish using the defrost setting on your microwave or in a saucepan on the stove top. (Note: if you are using white chocolate in place of candy melts, add a spoonful of shortening to keep the chocolate from hardening too quickly.)
Watch the consistency of the chocolate very carefully. Ideally you want the chocolate to be the consistency of honey. If the chocolate gets too hot, the shamrocks end up looking more like pancakes!
Mix the chocolate with a bit of green food coloring and pour it into a frosting bag. Line the mini pretzel sticks on a piece of wax paper and carefully pipe the chocolate over them.
We found it’s easiest to start with the tallest leaf of the shamrock first, then the side leaves, then the stem. The heat of the chocolate should help smooth the top out, but if the shamrock looks a little bumpy, you can shake or tap the wax paper to even it out.
While the shamrocks dried, we frosted the cupcakes.
Pour your green frosting into a separate decorators bag with a grass tip (#233). If you’re don’t have a grass tip or if you’re pressed for time, you can flat frost the cupcakes with a knife.
After all the cupcakes are frosted, the shamrocks should be ready to go! The chocolate shamrocks make the perfect cupcake toppers because they are extremely light-weight and don’t tear the cupcake or fall over.
Push the cupcake topper in at an angle in the back third of the cupcake until the chocolate meets the frosting.
According to legend, Saint Patrick banished the snake (symbolic of the devil) from Ireland. We decided to display this scene on the cupcakes by showing snakes crawling away from the shamrocks!
To do this, we rolled and decorated snakes using fruit chews (multi-colored tootsie rolls) and regularly flavored tootsie rolls.
This step is super fun because you can literally use tootsie rolls and fruit chews like play dough!
We added eyes and tongues to some snakes….
…and stripes to others!
There are three major relics attributed Saint Patrick, a goblet, a bell (Saint Patrick’s Bell), and a book (Angel’s Gospel) so we wanted to decorate a cupcake with mini replicas of these relics. Saint Patrick also has a saltire – a red cross on a white backdrop, so we made a flag out of fruit chews and attached it to a pretzel.
One fun thing about this project is that the decorations are entirely edible!
Does your family have a special Saint Patrick dessert or meal? Tell us about it in the comments below!
