St. Patrick's Day baking

I guess most people drink (green beer?) for St. Patrick's Day, but I bake. On top, Nigella's chocolate guinness cake; below, easy Irish soda bread (no caraway seeds).

Our neighbors have a St. Patrick's Day party every year, which gives me an excuse to bake. (We won't discuss how most weekends I have no such excuse, but bake anyway. I have started to notice how much butter I've been buying and I've decided...not to notice any more.)

A few notes from the weekend:

• the cooking class Nick took is paying off. He made chocolate chip-banana muffins this morning. Now if he could only do so without waking me up first!
• it is actually possible to watch basketball for over eight hours straight. I'm not sure it's a good idea, but it's possible.
• knitting while watching basketball improves both activities.
• I am working on a sweater. I last made a sweater with sleeves about twenty years ago, for Mark, before I had heard of the sweater curse. (I'm not the Libby cited in the article, but my story is similar.) Mark's sweater was too short and too wide, and the sleeves were too long--it might have been a nice fit on an orangutan, but it really didn't work for him. Still, he wore it once or twice and only recently asked if he could give it to Goodwill. So anyway this sweater is for me, it will have sleeves, and I am just a little nervous about it.
  
• we got to watch the VCU game at the party. The hometown crowd got very excited as regulation ended and we had tied it. You haven't lived until you've watched a hometown basketball game on TV with about a dozen ten-year-old boys. I think my hearing will come back eventually.
• having baked the cake there are still five bottles of Guinness left in the fridge. Somehow I don't think they'll go to waste.