Thursday, March 25, 2010

St. Patrick's feasting

Ooof! This week has been rough for me. But I'm still here! Hopefully, I'll start feeling more myself again soon and build up some energy to take some more pictures so I can share some crafty goodness. In the meantime, I'll show you this:

Chocolate Guinness Cake!

Chocolate Guinness cake of yumminess
And, YES, it tastes as good as it looks! I made this for our annual St. Patrick's feast we hosted this past Sunday. Super easy, super yummy. The recipe is from the domestic goddess, Nigella Lawson (though I actually used this one, because I'm lazy metrically challenged). The biggest hurdle in putting it together was in not drinking the rest of the Guinness. But I was a good girl, and didn't even take a taste.

I wish I had a picture of the rest of the feast (which included soda bread, corned beef, colcannon, pan-roasted carrots, festive green fruit salad, and roasted brussels sprouts and horseradish), but I got distracted and didn't manage to get one.

One thing I learned: corning an already corned beef = crazy, overpowering corned beef flavor. But at least it was edible (I was a little concerned we'd be ordering pizza). Next time though, I will definitely make the effort to find a plain brisket to start with (my regular grocery store doesn't carry beef brisket of the non-corned variety).

Another thing I learned: hosting a big ol' feast when 35 weeks pregnant is maybe not such a brilliant plan (and I've been suffering for it these last few days). But, it was still a lot of fun!

7 comments:

  1. Wow, I am impressed! I don't think I could have done that when I was 35 weeks.

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  2. I hope you are feeling better today.
    Boy, what a feast you created and the cake does look yummy and it looks so pretty on the cake stand.
    If the recipe was in metrics I would be having a very hard time too.

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  3. What a beautiful cake and great celebration! St. Patrick's Day is my birthday and my husband's name is Patrick(and he's a saint!), so we love that day!

    Hope you are feeling better and we can't wait to see the new baby and find out whether it's a boy or girl!

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  4. 35 weeks already?? How exciting!!!!

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  5. Sorry I'm a little late with this, but I just wanted to state for the record, that cake was DELICIOUS!!!! And Vada asked for carrots for dinner the next night - a minor miracle!

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  6. Sounds like the perfect St. Patrick's Day. I will have to remember that cake for next year.

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  7. I admit I was a little weary of the double-corning, but I'm glad it was edible. Just let me know next time if you need me to ship you a "real" brisket! ;-) I'm going to have to check out Madame Nigella's cake recipe . . . my Guinness cake recipe is 3-layers with a ganache frosting, and while that's cool for someone who's a chocoholic, I think I'd like this one better . . .

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