Irish Goldrush Cupcakes for St Patricks Day

It is St Patrick's Day today, so time to get out your best green finery, drink green beer and sing Irish songs.  In Australia, there is a St Patrick's Day parade held in many cities and towns around the country so that people can celebrate their Irish heritage - or their wannabe Irishness!

I decided to make cake to celebrate St Patrick's Day, because that is what I do.  I saw what looked like a great idea for Irish Gold Rush cupcakes online here. These cupcakes look super, but unfortunately I encountered a few problems trying to make them.  First up, the recipe lists sugar in the ingredients, but not in the method, so there was no prompt to add sugar to the cake batter.  I wondered about the weird rubbery texture of my batter and stuck my cupcakes in the oven for 10 minutes before I re-read the ingredients and realised that there was no sugar in the batter. Those cakes went straight to the garbage.  

Instead, for round 2, I made the good old reliable Primrose Bakery Vanilla Cupcakes and dyed them green.  Here are the cakes with their centres all hollowed out, ready for the chocolate sauce (or in my case, Nutella) filling:

And here they are again, filled with a teaspoon of Nutella: 

I skipped the alcohol in the filling, as these cupcakes were going to be taken to work for my colleagues.

My next hurdle came trying to make the honeycomb for the topping, using the Scranline method.  The method said to boil the ingredients until they turned golden brown - umm, but they were golden brown almost straight away because one of the ingredients was golden syrup.  If you watch the video that accompanies the recipe (which I only did afterwards), you are told to boil the ingredients for 5-6 minutes.  There was no timing given in the written recipe. I believe that I removed my attempt at honeycomb from the heat way too soon, as I ended up with a delicious but sticky, stretchy, taffy-like substance, which also went to the bin.  

I remembered that Johanna had made honeycomb recently, so I went to her blog and made the recipe she gives for honeycomb instead.  Success: 

I now have a metric tonne of honeycomb (or what seems like it!), but it worked like a charm so that I had viable, crunchy honeycomb for the gold nuggets on top of my cupcakes.

As I had now diverged so far from the original recipe for the Irish Goldrush Cupcakes, I decided to keep going down that track.  I used my favourite vanilla frosting from the Primrose Bakery, dyed a festive shade of Irish green, to ice the cakes, and in addition to the gold honeycomb nuggets, I added a rainbow (to represent the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - get it?) in the form of a sour strap:  

I was pretty pleased with the end result, and the cupcakes were delicious if I say so myself.  I liked the "surprise inside" of the Nutella, which complemented the honeycomb nicely.  No-one at work got the Irish theme until I explained it, but that's OK.

Are you doing anything for St Patrick's Day?  Do you have an annual tradition like going to your local for a green beer or marching in the St Patrick's Day parade?

Happy St Patrick's Day!