St. Patrick’s Day Cupcakes

posted by Nancy on March 17, 2021 // 0 Comments

Fun and easy St. Patrick’s Day Cupcakes made with chocolate cupcakes and the best green Buttercream Frosting you’ve ever tasted. Leprechaun tested, St. Paddy approved.

Close up on five chocolate St. Patrick's Day Cupcakes sitting on a white table in front of a green towel and a cupcake pan full of chocolate cupcakes.

You don’t have to be Irish to love these gorgeous St. Patrick’s Day Cupcakes. Cupcakes are one of our favorite party desserts – so easy to make and serve and we’ve never met anyone who didn’t love a good chocolate cupcake topped with creamy homemade frosting. So this St. Paddy’s Day, wow your family and guests with cupcakes featuring our Best Buttercream Frosting, a little food coloring, and our favorite frosting swirl technique. We have all the tips and tricks you’ll need to make a cupcake even a Leprechaun will love.

Ingredients You Will Need

How to make the Cupcakes

Overhead shot of 12 chocolate cupcakes sitting on a white table surrounded by a cupcake pan and a black and white towel.

Step 1: Make a batch of cupcakes. You can use a cake box mix, we have all the instructions you’ll need to make them taste just like homemade right here. Or you can make them from scratch with our yummy Homemade Chocolate Cupcakes recipe. We used chocolate cupcakes but Vanilla Cupcakes would taste great too.

How to Make the Frosting

Close up on a clear bowl filled with Buttercream frosting sitting next to a decorating bag filled with buttercream frosting.

Step 2: The key to these delicious cupcakes is our Best Buttercream Frosting recipe. It is light and creamy and buttery and super delicious! You will find the recipe and directions here. One batch of frosting will be enough to frost 12 cupcakes. If you used a boxed cake mix, you should have about 18 cupcakes and will need to double the frosting recipe. Once you have the frosting made, split it into thirds. Because the three layers of the frosting swirl are not all the same size we portioned our single batch of frosting as follows:

Dark Green: 1 cup
Light Green: 3/4 cups
White: 1/2 cup

How to Color the Frosting

Collage image showing the formulas from making the green and white colored frosting for the St. Patrick's Day Cupcakes.

Now it is time to tint the frosting. We like the Wilton Color Right Food Coloring. It is concentrated and you can get a bright color without having to use too much food coloring. Here are the formulas we used for our St. Patrick’s Day green frosting colors:

Bright Green: 6 drops of Yellow food coloring and 1 drop of Blue food coloring.
Dark Green: 8 drops of Yellow food coloring and 1 drop of Blue food coloring.
White: No food coloring.

Tip: Start with the yellow food coloring, get it completely mixed together with the frosting and then add the blue food coloring.

Putting it All Together

Chocolate cupcake in a green cupcake liner sitting in front of a cupcake tin full of cupcakes and three frosting decorating bags.

Step 4: Load the three colors of frosting into separate decorating bags with a Wilton 1M Open Star Decorating Tip and gather up your cupcakes!

Collage image showing exactly how to create the three color frosting swirl.

Step 5: For each cupcake, you will make three swirls of the frosting. Dark Green on the bottom, then light green, and finally white.
Step 6: With the decorating bag and the 1M tip, make one and a half circles of dark green frosting around the edge of the cupcake.
Step 7: Next apply another 1 1/2 circles of light green frosting but this circle should be a little smaller than the dark green frosting layer as shown in the picture above.
Step 8: Finally, with the white frosting, add a third circle but this time finishing with an upward flourish so that the swirl ends in a peak at the top.

You can watch a video of how to make a frosting swirl like this in our How to Frost Cupcakes post.

Expert Tips and FAQs

How far ahead of a party can you make these cupcakes?

Ideally, you should make the cupcakes the day before the party. You can store them in the refrigerator but remember to take them out a couple of hours before you are going to serve them because a cold cupcake is not a good cupcake. If you are short on time, you could make the cupcakes further ahead and freeze them until the day before the party and then defrost them and frost them the day before the party.

Do the cupcakes have to be refrigerated?

No. They will be fine left out at room temperature. Day one and two, they will taste great. On day three, the frosting will start to be hard on the outside and the cupcakes will start to get a little bit stale but they will still taste fine. After day four … the cupcakes will be stale. You can get another day or two out of them by storing them in the refrigerator.

Closeup on a St. Patrick's Day Cupcake featuring a chocolate cupcake with three swirls of dark green, light green and white buttercream frosting.

Other St. Patrick’s Day Desserts You Will Love

St. Patrick’s Day Popcorn

St. Patrick’s Day Marshmallow Pops

St. Patrick’s Day Rice Krispie Treats Bites

St. Patrick’s Day Mint M&M Cookies

Did you Make This Recipe? Leave a review below, then snap a picture and tag @twosisterscrafting on Instagram so we can see it!
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