Pineapple and shamrocks

Firstly, I must tell you that shamrocks and four-leaf clovers are not the same thing. A shamrock only has three leaves and is a symbol of Ireland, whereas a four-leaf clover, as the name suggests, has four and is said to be good luck. I guess that is my little lesson for the day and one I learnt myself from my lovely Irish housemate. You might wonder how this is relevant to the topic at hand; well on Thursday we had a farewell at work for said housemate, whom I also worked with. I decided to make some shamrock cookies so I could finally use the cookie cutter and sprinkles I had purchased ages ago and because she is Irish. I have previously made sugar cookies as mentioned here. However, I did want to try a new recipe, which ended up being this one. For the frosting, as I so often do, I mixed some of this with a little bit of that before tinting it green. I find that the key frosting ingredients for me are icing sugar, butter, vanilla essence, milk and meringue powder to help it set. I usually just work with the quantities I have on hand to achieve a flavour and consistency I am happy with because experimenting when baking is really enjoyable. I used a Wilton 21 decorating tip to pipe the frosting onto the cookies.

The cookies didn't fit the Hawaiian theme we had decided on, but the pineapple upside down cake I made sure did. I was pretty nervous about making this cake because I haven't made one since high school. Although there was a massive flaw to the recipe I choose in that it didn't list the oven temperature, which I decided should be 350 degrees celsius. I baked it in an eight inch round cake tin for fifty minutes and it turned out pretty well. I think if I make it again I would like to add some more pineapple to the cake as the four slices left a bit of a gap in the middle.

I think we did a really good job at making it more of a celebration than a farewell, but either way it marked the end of our working time together.