Green Velvet Cupcakes

It's St. Patrick's Day.  I don't care.  I might have cared more if the day fell on a Friday or Saturday, but since I have to work tomorrow, and since I have no interest in running into my students downtown while drunk off my ass, I've opted instead to sleep, shop, and bake.

In fact, it was last year's St. Patrick's Day when I first attempted to make a cake from scratch.  The cake wasn't so good, too vanilla-y, but it was enough to get me interested in baking from scratch, a hobby that's been great fun, but that's kept me hugely fat.  Oh well.  What can you do?

For today's baking adventure, I decided to make green velvet cupcakes, with some kind of cooked delicious icing. 

This is actually my first attempt at red velvet (green for today) cupcakes, for several reasons.

1. I'm not a huge chocolate eater.
2. I'm intimidated by chocolate desserts.
3. When I was a teenager one of my aunts became obsessed with red velvet cake for a few months, and told me that she'd eaten so much red velvet cake that she pooped red.  I thought that was gross, even though I'd experienced a similar fate when I ate an entire package of tongue splashers bubble gum.

So I'd left it alone, even though it seems to be a favorite of everyone on earth.  But Bakerella's little green velvet cakes were pretty, and I had all of the ingredients on hand, so I went for it.

Mine were not as pretty, but they tasted pretty good, which was a relief to me because the recipe calls for a combination of oil and vinegar instead of butter, and I find any baking recipe that neglects to use butter, well, suspect. 

If this combination of liquid ingredients doesn't make you salivate, I don't know what will.

I also found some cute cupcake liners that seemed appropriate for the occasion while sheet shopping today at HomeGoods. 

My cupcakes were not nearly as pretty as Bakerella's (that bitch!), but at least they tasted good.

The icing was really good, but I did something wrong with it.  I messed it up by either using buttermilk instead of milk (need to get through my thick head that they are not interchangeable) or by mixing it too much in the mixer.  Tasted great, looked weird.  Not poisonous, I swear.

Then I talked to both Grandmas on the phone, and took a nap on the couch, which seems to be one of my body's only defense mechanisms against the uterine rebellion that's currently taking place.  Stupid womanhood, ruining my life.

Oh, and I went onto the Book of Faces and unfriended almost every single person I'm related to, with a few exceptions.  It seems that the mood swings brought on by the uterine rebellion gave me just enough nerve to do it.  At least there's a silver lining, right?