St. Patrick's Day 2012

Today I wanted to sort of surprise the kids with some new recipes I found on Pinterest and have my usual St. Patty's dinner of corned beef and veggies in the crockpot. So this morning we had Cake Batter Pancakes for breakfast. They enjoyed it, but I have a few changes I'm going to make the next time I make it. You can find the original recipe here. I pretty much followed her recipe, but adjusted a little bit. She uses almond milk, which I'm sure adds some flavor to the pancake. Since we have a tree nut allergy here, I used regular whole milk. I think I'll decrease the amount of milk I used and increase the amount of vanilla next time. I used more milk in the glaze than the recipe called for. Here's my adjustments.

I doubled the recipe except for the eggs, but that was by mistake.

I used 3 cups of milk.


I was looking at the recipe with my phone, so I missed the part of mixing the dry ingredients before adding the eggs, despite my experience telling me that dry and wet are usually separate steps. But then again, my budding baker was playing 20 questions with me at the time.



A picture of the pancake batter:

A picture of the glaze:

Oh, and of course, since it's St. Patty's Day, I colored both the pancakes and glaze green!

It was pretty tasty and the kids liked it, but I think it will be better next time with the changes I need to make for us. Little one enjoyed it and went crazy over it when she discovered the little bit of glaze that I had smeared over hers.

Since the griddle was washed up and out from breakfast, we decided to have grilled cheese for lunch with Shamrock Shakes. As funny as it may sound, we have had the priveledge of introducing two or three people to grilled cheese sandwiches. One of oldest child's friends stayed for lunch. She had never had a grilled cheese sandwich before and asked if it was good. We laughed and she decided after trying, that it was good. She has had a Shamrock Shake before, and apparently I was the only one in our family who has had one before. Some liked it and some didn't. I didn't actually measure everything, but more-or-less eyeballed everything. If I make them again, I may measure so that the peppermint isn't too strong. You can find the recipe for the Shamrock Shakes here. I happened to have green colored sugar crystals (rather my budding baker had them - was given them in a baking kit for Christmas) as well as gold sugar crystals. So I sprinkled green for green sake and gold for the "pot of gold at the end of the rainbow". I giggled to myself about it and the younger kids thought it was a cute idea. The older kids were more like "whatever, Mom."

For dinner we had corned beef that cooked in the crockpot with carrots, red potatoes, onion and cabbage. I love this meal. Little one seemed to like it as well. She was grabbing carrots and potatoes off my plate before I could get it on her tray. I didn't have time to make Irish Soda Bread, because it was an otherwise busy day with errands and other family commitments. All-in-all, a successful St. Patty's Day.