Happy St. Paddy’s Day!

Okay, I know I’m a couple of days late, but I really didn’t have much time to blog this weekend! Neither Andrew nor I are Irish, but I’m the type of person who looks for reasons to decorate for a new occasion and to bake yummy treats. 🙂

A few days into March, I turned my Valentine’s mantle into my St. Patrick’s Day mantle:

It’s really satisfying to find a way to decorate on a dime. I’m still pondering what cute thing I can come up with for Easter!

The day before St. Patrick’s Day (conveniently a Friday), I made my favorite butter cookies. Andrew had plans for a guys’ night out in Newmarket, so I was fairly excited to have the house to myself to watch movies (ones Andrew wouldn’t like) and spend hours decorating those cookies! The movies I watched weren’t the greatest, I’ll admit…

First I learned that you shouldn’t watch a movie based solely on who’s in it. I like Liam Neeson. I like Julianne Moore. And I’ve liked Amanda Seyfried in some of the things she’s done. So I thought I would like “Chloe.” Before I started watching it, I looked it up on Google and one of the first things I saw was that it was an erotic thriller. That right there worried me a bit. Needless to say, I didn’t really enjoy the movie. The actors all did a pretty good job, I think, but it was just really weird. The title character seriously has some issues, and in general I just felt like something was lacking.

Then I watched “Martha Marcy May Marlene.” Another pretty weird movie, but at least this one was intriguing and very “real” feeling. It stars the Olsen twins’ younger sister, Elizabeth, and I was actually really impressed by her. I guess I just wasn’t expecting much, based on all of the straight-to-video movies her older sisters were in during their teens, but Elizabeth Olsen really played the title role well. It’s a story about a young woman who escapes from a cult-like living environment and tries to meld back into “normal” life. It really doesn’t sugar-coat anything, and your heart really goes out to this woman’s struggles. I’ll probably make Andrew watch it, mostly to get his opinion on it!

Oh, and during this time, I got all of my cookies decorated. 🙂

I can never seem to stick with just one or two colors. Even for these, I felt the need to make two shades of green. They turned out pretty cute, and they were delicious, as usual!

I had outlined the cookies before dinner so the icing would have time to dry before I went back to “flood” the cookies with thinner icing. So two movies’ worth of decorating…roughly 3 hours? I don’t think I took all of “Martha Marcy May Marlene” to decorate them either. But now I know why people go with sprinkles to decorate: it’s a lot quicker!

The final movie I watched? “Midnight in Paris,” a romantic comedy starting Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams. Definitely a good end to my trio of movies, since it was a lot more lighthearted than the previous two! This one was about a frustrated writer who gets transported back to the 20s every night at midnight while walking the streets of Paris. If you don’t know much about the writers, artists, and music of this era, you might not enjoy the movie much. But I thought it was pretty good, especially seeing how these famous people of the 20s are portrayed. It made some of those college English literature classes come back to me. 🙂

Andrew got home pretty late, so we slept in a bit on St. Patrick’s Day. I had bought some Baileys Irish Creme on Thursday, mostly for the cupcakes I wanted to make, but also to put in my coffee Saturday morning.

Delicious! My coffee looks pretty light there, huh? I may have been a little generous with the Baileys. Oh well, that’s what Saturdays are for! Plus it was St. Patrick’s Day!

After my butter finally was softened enough (I’m never patient waiting for that to happen!), I made Baileys Irish Creme cupcakes from a recipe I found online. I am not much of a cake person, and I’m not sure how good the actual cupcake part of these was, because I put quite a bit of Baileys buttercream frosting on top! Mmm, that was the best part!

The recipe said to double the frosting part if you wanted to put on as much frosting as is shown in the picture, but I just halved the cupcake part (no way did we need 24 cupcakes here!).

We had another couple over for dinner (Andrew grilled some Juicy Lucy burgers), and then after they headed home, another couple came over to hang out. We watched “The Boondock Saints,” which was the only St. Paddy’s Day-related movie we could think of. Overall, we had a fun, relaxing St. Patrick’s Day, which is what we both wanted. We may have had too many crazy St. Paddy’s Day celebrations in college… 🙂