St. President

This is a combo post.

First, are you in the market for a presidential candidate? Have I got a candidate for you! My brother is running for student body president of UC Berkeley. This is even better if you actually go to Berkeley and can vote for him (grad students can vote in the election, I'm told). If you don't go to Berkeley, you can encourage your friends who go there to vote in the election. The good news is that anyone can check out his website!

And, now, my St. Patrick's Day baking project. I made filled Irish cream cupcakes. I didn't go for the Bailey's, since it was too expensive. Instead, I used St. Brendan's to no obvious difference. I again used the recipe from this book. Unlike the champagne recipe I used for New Year's, these cupcakes definitely tasted like Irish cream. Thus, I think that next time I make these, I would skip the Irish cream filling. I think I'm really just not a filled cupcake person - I felt like the texture was all wrong, and I just wanted the filling to be chocolate, not Irish cream. So maybe chocolate ganache filling would be okay, but Irish cream vanilla filling wasn't. I used the fudge frosting recipe from the cookbook, substituting bittersweet chocolate for semi-sweet chocolate. The frosting was good, but it took two batches to frost all the cupcakes. I topped the cupcakes with watercress (sort of like 4 leaf clovers?), but the watercress soon went limp, so this wasn't the greatest idea. Perhaps next year I should use gummy worms?