St. Patrick's Day Desserts

I was hoping to have a new St. Patrick’s Day-themed recipe for you before the 17th.  However, with a quick-yet-outrageous trip to Los Angeles earlier this week in addition to furiously cranking out a round of CocoaRoar truffles for St. Paddy’s Day, I haven’t had time to explore anything new in the kitchen. My chocolate tempering machine is purring away in the background as I type, and as I wait for it to melt a pound of chocolate into a beautiful glossy pool so I can dip the last few hundred truffles, I thought I’d re-share a few St. Patrick’s Day ideas from previous entries.  Of course you may just want to spend tomorrow in your favorite Irish pub drinking Guinness or green beer.  But here are a few fun holiday-themed dessert ideas, should you need to balance out your beer and pub food intake.

This Black&White Guinness Float tastes like the most sophisticated milkshake you could ever hope to have. Despite its velvety dark appearance, Guinness stout is surprisingly light and frothy, making it a natural pairing with ice cream, and this beer float plays up both the deep chocolate notes and the creamy quality of the Guinness.  Sign me up, please.

The Guinness Gingerbread Cake is still one of the best cakes to ever come out of my kitchen, which I originally made for Sylvia’s birthday bash two years ago. (Happy birthday, Syl!) The cake is fragrant with spices (ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, cardamom, and even a little dry mustard for heat!), deepened with Guinness for complexity, and the flavors all come together beautifully with a vanilla cream cheese frosting.  

 

Guinness Gingerbread Cake

I am serious about celebrating birthdays, not only my own but those of my loved ones, and I truly believe that a birthday should involve great cake. When a friend’s birthday is on the horizon, I usually pounce on the opportunity to try out a new recipe on my long list of Things To Bake. I can’t usually justify whipping up a multi-layered cake for myself, but I somehow made an exception to that rule this week, for I found myself making this Guinness Gingerbread Cake not once but three times in the past week. It was that good. 

Sylvia had a big birthday last weekend, and I volunteered my cake-baking services for her celebration. Most of my friends request some form of chocolate creation, but Sylvia’s favorite cake is a spicy gingerbread one. Some of the best gingerbread recipes I’ve made involve dark beer to intensify the flavor, and it’s convenient that her birthday falls right near St. Patrick’s Day since I always have plenty of Guinness on hand. 

I once made Claudia Fleming’s Oatmeal Stout Gingerbread Cake for Sylvia’s birthday several years ago, a dessert our friends had all enjoyed at Gramercy Tavern once upon a time. It was a rich Bundt cake, dark with molasses and heavily spiced with two kinds of ginger. But I wanted to do something different this year, having recently came across this Gingerbread Beer Cake in my new book, Sky High Cakes, and I couldn’t wait to try it out.

Black&White Guinness Float

I’m dying to share something that I know will make your day. Once you taste my Black&White Guinness Float, you will wonder how you ever lived without it. I know you’re probably thinking, “Louise, are you out of your mind?!!” While it may sound strange pairing beer with ice cream, the combination totally works. Think of it as a root beer float for grown-ups.

I’m always happy when I find a multi-purpose recipe that is appropriate for a variety of occasions. Some of you may want to jumpstart your St. Patrick’s Day festivities this week, so this Irish stout cocktail will definitely get into the spirit of it all. If you’re celebrating the arrival of spring, a refreshing ice cream drink can enhance your enjoyment of the gorgeous and unseasonably warm days we’ve had in NYC this week. And if you’ve had a slightly stressful day–whether or not you were interviewed by Anderson Cooper in the morning about your unusual autobiographical memory—then a Guinness float is exactly the thing to help you unwind. Trust me, it really helps!

Guinness stout has long been my beer of choice. Velvety and bittersweet, I love it for its full-bodied complexity. As a major bonus, not only is it rich in iron and antioxidants, it is oddly low in calories. What’s not to love about that?

I wanted my beer float to play up both the deep chocolaty notes and the creamy quality of the Guinness. Since I prefer a Black&White milkshake—made with vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup rather than being made from only chocolate ice cream—I decided that that principle should apply for this drink as well. A healthy glug of chocolate syrup mixed with the beer in the bottom of the glass intensifies the toasty richness of the Guinness, so much so that it’s practically crying out for a scoop of vanilla ice cream to make the party complete.