irish sunday dinner

sunday we had some friends over to enjoy some good ol' irish food in celebration of st. patrick's day wednesday. i had never made corned beef and cabbage so i gave it a whirl, borrowed a recipe from pioneer woman's tasty kitchen blog (which is an amazing resource for fabulous recipes) which turned out great, roasted some potatoes served with rye bread and topped it all off with these killer chocolate beer and whiskey cupcakes from smitten kitchen.  i died the frosting green to keep it in the spirit.  chocolate cupcakes with guinness in the batter filled with bittersweet chocolate and whiskey ganache topped with buttercream and baileys frosting - yep, they really are that good!  i recommend making the cupcakes the night before serving and refrigerating. when they are cold (or the next day) use an apple corer to remove most of the middle where you'll pipe in the ganache. refrigerate more to help the ganache set up while you whip up the frosting and frost a few hours before you serve. delicious! i'm experimenting with a dozen or so in the freezer to see if they'll keep. i'm pretty certain my father-in-law will be quite interested in testing them for me in a couple weeks!  (i nabbed the cupcakes photo below from smitten kitchen's website-this is those amazing cupcakes pre-frosting so you can see the awesomeness of the ganache filling.)