It was only three weeks ago!

So that means I can still post pictures of it, right? :) Pictures which are not mine, by the way, but were sent to me by more responsible friends who remember to have their cameras handy!

We are talking St Patty's day today. It was forever ago and we have all moved on with our lives, but I made a cake for it, so here we are.

Some of our friends decided to have a little shin-dig for the Big Green, which made me very happy. I am always glad when there is reason to celebrate something.. even if we have no idea why exactly we are celebrating (though there were some discussions on this that evening). So I offered to bring a dessert, naturally, and then had fun coming up with something appropriate for the holiday.

I hemmed and hawed and finally just decided to do a basic white cake. Nothing fancy.. but then I went crazy and made a surprise inside :)

Here is our spread of green and orange and Irish food.. It was very, very tasty. Aed was an especially big fan of the potato soup (not pictured) and the bread.. are we surprised? Nope!

There's my poor attempt at an Irish exterior on my cake. Little green 'shamrocks', though they weren't all very convincing in their role.

But the INSIDE of the cake was green!

My decision to do three shades of green was completely random, but made slightly easier by the fact that we only own one 'cake' pan (I'm not even sure it's technically a cake pan). Thus I went from lighter to darker, and it took forever to get all the layers baked. In fact you can see the layers get progressively more dense as they go.. that's because I'm a novice and was afraid that the batter might dry out a bit as it sat waiting for it's turn in the oven. So, each time I did another layer, I added a splash of milk. I think it would have been perfectly fine to just leave the batter as it was.. but I had myself convinced and once that happens, there's no arguing.

Then there was the whole 'Tesco wouldn't quit being out of powdered sugar' thing. That made the icing sort of difficult.. so it was a little grainy, but I am told it was still good (though not as good as it could have been!).

I really like making cakes. Aed really likes eating them.. along with everyone else, so I guess it's a win-win! The little guy was very upset when the cake was gone :)