I found a recipe for strawberry champagne cupcakes online through a friend and decided that it was necessary to make them using White Zinfandel instead. My friend and I recently took on the challenge! The following baking pictorial follows this recipe (mostly).
So before we begin here is what the final product looked like! Yummy! :D
So we began by mixing the dry ingredients together. We didn't have cake flour so we made our own by mixing normal unbleached flour and corn starch. In a separate container we combined the wet ingredients including the Sutter Home White Zin and (almost) pureed strawberries. We didn't have quite enough strawberries to meet the recipes requirements but the cupcakes still tasted of strawberry.
Then we were supposed to add red food coloring but of course we had none. Instead we thought it would be awesome to add blue instead in the hope that it would make purple.......it didn't. It looked like grey nastiness but luckily this didn't show through in the baked cupcakes, haha.
Putting the batter into the cupcake tins. It was much thicker than we were used to working with.
While the cupcakes baked we simmered a cup of white zin down to two tablespoons in preparation to make the icing.
Once the butter cream icing was properly mixed we added the wine to the icing and it made a pretty light pink and AMAZINGLY delicious mixture.
Cupcakes are out of the oven and aren't grey! YAY!
Here is a final shot of our cupcakes after everything cooled and the icing was applied. Would I do this again? Sort of. The cake itself was decent but the icing is really where its at. I want to put white zinfandel icing on every cupcake I ever make for the rest of forever. So. Good. I definitely recommend grabbing your favorite semi sweet wine and using it to make some awesome cupcakes!!
