52 Weeks of Pinspiration {Week 11}–St. Paddy’s Mint Frosted Brownies

Happy St. Patrick’s Day and Welcome to Week 11 of my Pinspiration series!

I hope you are doing something fun to celebrate today.  We are going to pay a visit to my parents! I wanted to take some kind of fun treat to their house and spied these delicious looking mint brownies (seriously, how gorgeous are these brownies!!) on Pinterest and thought they would be perfect.

I read through the recipe on this gal’s site and it looked easy enough.  The only problem was I had just spent the entire morning cleaning house and didn’t feel like making a huge mess in my kitchen.  Plus I had a box of my favorite, go-to brownie mix in the pantry.

This mix is as good as any homemade brownie (imho) so I made the executive decision to use this instead.

I like feeling large and charge like that. 😉

OK.  So the next dilemma was the fact that I wanted to take these to my parents, but I could just hear Tripp and Kelsey (home for spring break!! yay!!!) going, “Wha???? Uh!!!  We have to wait til tomorrow to eat them??”  And then if I buckled under pressure and cut into the brownies I’d be taking ‘sloppy seconds’ to Mom and Daddy’s.  So not cool.

Then I had the brilliant idea to make the brownies in my muffin pan and use the Sisters’ frosting on them like a cupcake. 

BTW, their blog is adorable – so fun and lots of great stuff!

I’ve made brownies in muffin cups before and the deal is that you have to grease the cups REALLY well…so liberally coat each cup with butter.

And then divide the batter between each cup – it’s about 2 Tablespoons. 

Don’t ask me how I know this. Just take my word for it.

I baked my brownies for about 18-20 minutes.  The outsides will be totally cooked and the middles may be a teeny bit soft and gooey, but that’s OK.  Let them cool in the pan for at least 30 minutes or so and they’ll continue to cook a bit.

Letting them completely cool in the pan also makes getting them out easier.  What I do is run a butter knife around the outsides and then gently use the knife to lift them out.  You can see the tops flattened out a bit as they cooled too.

The next thing I did was make the Sisters’ super quick frosting.  I planned to pipe the frosting on top so I made a couple of adjustments to the recipe – #1 I used softened butter instead of melting it, and #2 I reduced the milk by 1 Tablespoon.

Then I got my trusty disposable piping bag and 1M tip ready.

Have I mentioned how much I love these Wilton disposable piping bags?  Back in the day, when I took Cake Decorating classes, the instructor showed us how to make disposable bags by intricately folding squares of parchment paper.  Please.  These plastic ones are a millions times easier!

Hmmmmm….wonder what happened here?

Looks like my delightful daughter snuck a few nibbles while I was in the shower. 

{Purrrrrrr}

Anyway, this is what the brownies looked like after getting frosted.

And look there…just enough icing left for a taste test!

OMG.  So yummy!  And minty!  But wait…I have one more little idea.

Now that my friends is one minty St. Patrick’s Day brownie!

With any luck I’ll have enough leftover to take to my parents. 

Enjoy friends!!

Peace, Kelly