St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland and has been a cause for celebration each spring since the 17th century. Irish peoples have migrated worldwide, and wherever there’s an Irish community, you can count on a legendary St. Patrick’s Day celebration.
St. Patrick’s Day parades, dyed green rivers, and overcrowded taverns with festive green cocktails mark the March holiday. Everyone wears green and Irish imagery abounds.
St. Patrick’s Day is also a great excuse to feast. While boiled bacon and cabbage may not be everyone’s favorite, desserts are always welcome.
I’ve thus come up with a long list of fun and delicious St. Patrick’s Day desserts to help you celebrate this March 17th. Get the green food coloring ready!
An iconic creature in Irish folklore, the Leprechaun is a quintessential fairy of mischief.
These bright green crinkle cookies are sweet enough to fuel your St. Patrick’s Day shenanigans.
Made with cake mix and mint extract, these cookies are sweet, minty, and deliciously chewy thanks to a hefty serving of butter. These are great shareable St. Patrick's Day desserts for a party!
No oven? No problem! This festive bake-free oreo bark recipe is a party in your mouth.
It blends melted milk chocolate, white chocolate, and Oreos into a crunchy creamy dream.
Of course, the white and dark chocolate foundation is the perfect canvas for green sprinkles and M&Ms which also add another layer of texture.
If your adult mind wants to irreverently imagine the more intimate details of a Leprechaun’s anatomy, this dessert is the best means to do so.
These boozy dessert balls combine vanilla wafers with Irish Whiskey, Baileys, and cocoa powder for an adult indulgence.
Plus, they’re dipped in green icing and rolled in decorative sprinkles!
Chocolate and mint is a classic flavor pairing.
A case in point is this wonderful brownie recipe. The texture is my favorite part of these brownies, as you get the fudginess of brownies punctuated by a cookie crunch.
Mint Oreos happen to have a green cream filling, making them the perfect ingredient for St. Patrick’s Day desserts.
I like to top a warm brownie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream!
A great family project, this St. Patrick’s Day Muddy Buddies dessert is a trail mix of all your favorite childhood snacks and cereals.
Combining the mix, chocolate, and peanut butter, with the iconic Lucky Charms cereal marshmallows, you get a delicious and nostalgic dessert snack.
The fun part is putting it all together by shaking the ingredients up in a plastic bag to coat with coloring and powdered sugar.
Baileys is one of Ireland’s most popular liqueurs and tastes as delicious in a drink as it does in a dessert.
These decadent St. Patrick’s Day cheesecake bars have a delicious Oreo foundation to contrast the utterly creamy, Baileys-infused cheesecake.
I loved the addition of sour cream to complement the rich Baileys with tanginess.
If you want the “luck of the Irish,” you can make it yourself with these adorable and delectable dessert cups.
If you’re a fan of crafts projects, you’ll enjoy this involved recipe. It starts with personal-sized pots that you fill with layers of pudding, crunchy chocolate cookies, and gold sprinkles.
The piece de resistance is the rainbow jelly candy sticking out of each pot.
A major upgrade from the graham cracker and roasted marshmallow classics, these Leprechaun Hat S’mores are cute and delicious.
They start with a chocolate-dipped Keebler Fudge Striped Cookie topped with a chocolate-dipped marshmallow to create a top hat.
The rest is a DIY course in piping and icing decoration which is fun and easier than it seems!
The only thing better than a cream pie is an ice cream pie!
This delicious and simple Grasshopper Pie is the ultimate crowd-pleaser, using a mint chocolate chip ice cream filling, a mint Oreo foundation, and a fluffy cool whip topping.
It’s a very simple recipe that only requires freezer time to set the ice cream.
Rainbow cakes are all the rage, but this St. Patrick’s Day Cake takes it a step further. It’s essentially a cake inside of a cake.
You have to make both a rainbow cake and a chocolate pound cake.
You incorporate shamrock-shaped pieces of rainbow cake into the center of the chocolate cake batter before the final bake, so you get a rainbow shamrock with each delicious bite.
Perhaps my favorite use of Lucky Charms, this Lucky Charms Ice Cream Sandwich uses the Lucky Charms cereal instead of inflated rice to make “rice crispy” treats as the sandwich bread.
This recipe calls for strawberry ice cream to stuff inside the Lucky Charms sandwich, but I like to add more St. Patrick’s Day colors by using mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Parfaits are a classy French dessert that leaves plenty of room for creative license.
This clever recipe has you make individual parfaits in classy wine glasses, using green jello and cool whip.
The fluffy texture of the jello and cool whip makes for a delightful and refreshing dessert.
Bundt pans dress up any cake into a regal, rounded confectionary masterpiece.
Similar to a rainbow cake, this recipe uses a store-bought white cake mix that you divide into two bowls.
One bowl gets a few drops of green food coloring which you can marble or layer onto the white cake mix inside the bundt pan.
Another no-bake recipe, these Irish Cream truffles blend graham crackers with corn syrup and Irish cream liqueur for a rich filling.
After forming balls out of the filling, you dip them in melted chocolate almond bark.
The almond flavor with the Irish Cream liqueur is a match made in dessert heaven.
This rendition of crack candy is as addictive as the classic Christmas dessert.
It pours homemade brown sugar toffee over saltine crackers, dressing it all up with green and white chocolate melts.
The buttery toffee and salty saltines as both a flavor and texture powerhouse have rightfully earned this dessert’s irreverent name.
This homemade gummy recipe is surprisingly easy, blending lime green jello with extra gelatin, sugar, and applesauce.
It’s a great option to make with your kids, and the shamrocks come out perfectly, with a roll in granulated sugar for a nice crunchy outer layer.
Lime-flavored shamrock gummies offer a colorful pop to your St. Paddy’s day dessert table.
While you might be imagining Shamrock or Leprechaun cookie cutters, this recipe is a sugar cookie bar with out-of-this-world texture.
The bars are thicker than your average sugar cookie with a buttery, dense chew that puts it a cut above.
These bars get a thick layer of green icing with old-school sprinkles. You won’t be able to just eat one square!
The only difference between green and red velvet cupcakes is the food coloring!
You still get the notes of chocolate and delicious cream cheese frosting.
This recipe also adds vinegar and buttermilk to the batter for the lightest, fluffiest cake with a perfect complementary tang to its velvety chocolatey richness.
Pistachios should be the official nut of St. Patrick’s Day, their natural green hue adding Irish flare to any dessert.
This luscious dessert includes not only pistachios but almonds and walnuts too!
It’s a triple-layer bar with crunchy nutty toppings and foundations and a creamy pistachio pudding filling.
This two-ingredient recipe is a lemon-lime extravaganza.
Consisting of lime sherbet dropped into a mason jar filled with lemon-lime soda, this Lime Sherbet Float is the perfect St. Patrick’s Day refresher.
The bubbly soda and creamy sherbet offer the same fun mouthfeel as the classic root beer float. You can dress these up with green and white candy-stripe straws.
Revolutionizing the savory dip, this Baileys Irish Cream Dip is the ultimate crowd-pleaser.
You get dessert and booze in one light, fluffy bowl. It has the consistency of dip, using cream cheese, powdered sugar, and whipped cream to soak up the Baileys.
However, you enjoy it like fondue, dipping all matter of fruit, cookies, or candies.
This impressive-looking recipe cuts most of the leg work out of your baking by using ready-made pie crusts or frozen tart shells.
The filling is a luscious mix of white chocolate pudding, whipped cream, almond, and mint extract.
Mint and chocolate is a classic duo, but mint, chocolate, and almond are the ultimate trifecta.
A Southern ode to an Irish holiday, these green-tinted whoopie pies are as yummy to the eyes as they are to the palate.
Green velvet cake stuffed with thick cream makes these fluffy sandwiches the perfect finger food.
This recipe takes it a step further by having you press green and white sprinkles to the outer layer of cream.
Finally, an authentic Irish dessert! This Irish Apple Amber is the marriage of a cream pie and an apple pie.
The butter pie crust has a rich shredded apple and egg yolk filling, then uses the egg whites to create its classic meringue topping.
This dessert is a quintessential St. Paddy’s day tradition that you can also whip up for Thanksgiving day feasts.
This green twist on the classic peanut butter blossom switches peanut butter batter for pistachio pudding batter with chopped pistachios thrown in.
Pistachios and chocolate are a more refined yet equally delicious pairing as the classic peanut butter and chocolate.
Plus, the texture of the cookie is more cake-like with a wonderful crunch from the pistachio bits.
These are some of my favorite St. Patrick's Day cupcakes! Guiness adds a rich flavor and texture to cake, and I always have this classic Irish beer in stock for St. Patty's.
While I like cupcakes since they're shareable, you can also turn this recipe into a chocolate stout layer cake for a larger presentation.
To better fit the St. Patrick's Day theme, I also like to add green sprinkles or even shamrock sprinkles for an extra Irish spin.
if you love McDonald's Shamrock Shake, make it yourself this St. Paddy's Day! With this recipe, you can enjoy Shamrock Shakes year round.
All you need is vanilla ice cream, milk, green food dye, mint extract, and whipped cream to top it. Blend everything together for a festive frozen treat!
I like to top mine with whipped cream and chopped up Andes mints for a little mint chocolate chip flavor.