Champagne and Strawberry cupcakes!

This week is National Cupcake week so I had to try a new cupcake I'd been thinking about an idea for.

Ever since seeing some alcohol infused cupcakes at the Liverpool food festival I've been wanting to try a few ideas using that principle. Then last night on Cupcake Wars they had an aphrodisiac theme and I thought I'd go along those lines with a Champagne infused cupcake, then I thought what else goes well with champagne? oooh strawberry's and chocolate! So I decided to try out a Champagne infused cupcake then stuff it with a chocolate dipped strawberry and cover in champagne butter-cream. I had no idea whether this would work but I like them.

Here they are:

I also made a few cute heart shaped ones using some silicone moulds I bought the other day.

But I think they look most impressive cut in half because then you can see the chocolate dipped strawberry.

And here's how they're done:

Makes 12:

120g Plain Flour
140g Caster Sugar
1 1/2 Tsp Baking powder
40g Unsalted Butter
100ml Champagne (I just bought a cheap mini bottle)
1 egg
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
12 Strawberry's
100g Plain Chocolate


Preheat the oven to 170 deg C.

Put the flour, sugar, baking powder and butter in a bowl and beat with an electric whisk or rub the ingredients together till you get a sandy consistency and all the ingredients are combined. Beat in the Champagne until it is just incorporated.

Whisk the egg and vanilla together then pour into the mixture and beat until just incorporated.

At this point as it was really my first time experimenting with this I tasted the batter and adjusted slightly to my own taste, more champagne, sugar etc. But this is up to you. Spoon the mixture into 12 muffin cases until 2/3 full and bake for 20 - 25 mins or until Golden on top ( a skewer inserted should come out clean)

While the cakes are in the oven, melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of boiling water then dip each strawberry in the melted chocolate and stand top down on a plate.

then put these in the freezer for a few minutes to let the chocolate set.

Once the cakes are done remove them from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack.
Once cool cut a cone shaped piece out of the middle of each one and place a strawberry in the gap.

You can then use the crumbs from the cut out to press back on top of the strawberry.

Then for the Icing:

250g Icing Sugar
80g Butter
15ml Champagne
couple of drops of vanilla

Beat the butter into the sugar then beat in the vanilla and champagne. And again as before I then adjusted to taste.

I tried out a few different ways of icing and decorating using the tops of the strawberry's as a decoration. I know most cupcakes you see are piled with icing but even though it looks good I don't like to much icing and this is quite a strong tasting icing so doesn't need to much.

So there you go! My aphrodisiac champagne and strawberry cupcakes! 

Bye for now 

Cupcake Kris