Pinned Down Mondays - St. Patty's Day Fun

Hello!
I know, I know, you might be groaning from all the corned beef and cabbage that you had over the weekend... and you might be over the whole Green thing, but, well, here - we're always into green.

Green is my little boys favorite color - always has been.  So, when we started talking about St. Patrick's Day at the beginning of the week, once I mentioned that EVERYONE had to wear green or get pinched, he was all in.  I got pinched since I stayed in my pj's for most of the day, Papa got pinched because he wasn't wearing green... we take our pinching duties seriously around here!

Anyway, the Husband was out of town this weekend and we normally go to a local restaurant every St. Patty's Day for their All-You-Can-Eat Patty's Day dinner, but since Alan was gone, I decided to have a potluck here.  We had some friends and their kids over and it was a lot of fun.  It was easy for me, I just threw the corned beef in the crock pot and walked away.  We also made rainbow chip cupcakes with homemade buttercream icing -

Sorry, I had to use my iPhone for these shots - here he is stirring...

And pouring in more sugar... there is a serious amount of confection sugar in buttercream icing...

Yup - I let him use the mixers.  I was nervous about this, but I was very serious when I told him how/where to put his hands and we never had the mixer above a low speed... Can you see how he bites his bottom lip while he concentrates?  I love that -

And since it was St. Patty's Day, I let him put as much green food coloring into the icing as he wanted.  He was pretty impressed that the icing changed color -

For the cupcakes I used a rainbow chip cake mix - which I thought was a pretty good and an easy alternative to doing a rainbow batter like I was originally planning that I had pinned on Pinterest...

These look super fun, but I was trying to take it easy and not over do-it, which I have a tendency to do...

But, I had to kind of over-do-it...

Adam and I did make little treat holder's to give to his friends - I used a 3-D Leprechaun Hat from Silhouette and they turned out so cute!  And very easy to assemble!

We filled each of the hats with a little bit of kraft shred and then "gold and silver"  - which were rolo's, peanut butter cups and kisses!  They were super cute!

That's it for us today!  See you Wednesday!
Andrea