St. Patrick’s Day Surprise Cupcakes

These quick and easy St. Patrick’s Day cupcakes look like a pot of gold and taste absolutely delicious! Make them even easier by using your favorite chocolate cake recipe, store-bought frosting, and gold candies for the center!

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Easy St. Patrick’s Day Cupcakes

I’m pretty sure you would be the coolest mom ever if you brought these to your child’s classroom St. Patrick’s Day party (do they have those???). Almost as cool as if you made these cupcakes and played this roll a rainbow game !

I mean, how awesome would it be to see the kids take a bite and realize that there are actually gold coins inside.

games to play for halloween

Or you could even just take them to a St. Patrick’s Day party with your friends, really who doesn’t love a good surprise. And Reese’s Pieces, which is what I used to fill these with.

How to Make St. Patrick’s Day Cupcakes

These cupcakes are super simple to make! All you’ll need to make them is:

Your favorite chocolate cupcake mix (store bought mix is fine)
Your favorite white frosting (either homemade or store bought)
Black, blue, red, and yellow food coloring
Yellow Reese’s Pieces (could also use yellow Skittles or any other candy)
Cupcake corer (optional)

1 – Make your cupcakes.

Make the batter for your favorite cupcakes – store bought or homemade. Before you bake them, add a few drops of black food coloring to the batter to make them look like a black pot of gold.

Bake the cupcakes according to the recipe instructions and allow to cool once baked.

black batter for St Patrick

2 – Core your cupcakes.

Use a cupcake corer or just a knife and spoon to cut out the center middle of your cupcakes. Set aside the piece you cut out because you’ll want to save it to replace after you fill the cupcakes.

Just make sure you don’t cut all the way through to the bottom or your gold coins will fall out as soon as you add them into the cupcakes!

chuck e cheese party room

Coring St. Patrick

3 – Fill your cupcakes.

Add a spoon full of yellow Reese’s Pieces into each of the cupcakes then place the cut out piece back on top – cutting off a small piece of the cupcake if it doesn’t fit back in perfectly.

St Patrick

4 – Frost your cupcakes.

Split the frosting into three bowls and use food coloring to turn them into red, blue, and yellow frosting – one color frosting per bowl.

Rainbow frosting tutorial and awesome St. Patrick

Place a piping tip into a large piping bag or into a gallon size ziploc bag (with one of the corners cut out for the tip) to get the bag prepped for frosting.

Next, spoon the frosting into a large piping bag or a gallon size ziploc bag, alternating each color as you go. It’s hard to explain but hopefully the image below will help show you what I mean.

Frosting for St Patrick

Pick up the frosting bag and pipe frosting on top of each of the black cupcakes. Alternating the frosting colors ends up mixing the colors slightly and gives you a nice rainbow look for the frosting.

I did something similar for my Rainbow Butterfly Unicorn Kitty party ideas – simply made rainbow cupcakes with brighter, bolder colors instead of the standard red, blue, and yellow.