Strawberries and Champagne

For those of you who follow my blog, you're going to start to notice a trend - I make cakes and cupcakes for any reason I can find.  This past weekend I was fortunate enough to have an entire evening out (no kids, yay) with a wonderful group of gals for my sister-in-law's bachelorette party.  Of course when I got the invite I immediately started looking for cake ideas.  Let me just warn you now, DO NOT look up bachelorette cake ideas around your children, parents, grandparents... DEFINITELY don't do it at work, I think you get the idea.  I swear I'm still blushing!  Seriously, I can't even DREAM of decorating, let alone EATING some of those cakes!  Is anyone still reading, or are you all googling hen party cakes?

Despite my prudish ways I still wanted to bake something for the night and phallic cakes were definitely out of the question, so I started brainstorming on my own.  As I was looking through my fridge for flavor ideas, I noticed a bottle of champagne tucked in the back.  In my head champagne and a girls night out go hand in hand, right?  So I whipped out my stand mixer and a champagne buttercream was born!

And we all know what goes great with bubbly - strawberries!  Luckily I still had some of the strawberry preserves left over from my hello kitty cake.  Believe it or not, this was my first time filling cupcakes.  I might not have done it the best way, but it worked and was pretty easy so let's make some cupcakes, shall we?

First of all you need to bake yourself some cupcakes, I made vanilla.  Once they're cool, take a small paring knife and cut a circle out of the top of your cupcake and hollow yourself out a little hole. Then fill up the hole with your strawberry preserves.

Next up, give your kids a snack, waste not want not!

Now we're on to the buttercream.  I don't have very specific instructions here, it was a lot of trial and error!  Basically I whipped up a batch of buttercream and dumped in some champagne.  This of course makes a soupy mess so I added icing sugar to firm it up again.  I ended up using about a third of the bottle to get the flavor I wanted, as for the icing sugar....who knows!  Lots!!!!  The goal is to get the buttercream back to its original consistency after adding the bubbly.  I got mine pretty close but it was still really wet.  I was worried it was going to turn into a blob after piping but it held up nicely.  That being said, if I were to do this over I think I would pick up some sparkling wine flavoring (like this).  It packs a ton of flavor into very little liquid so it has very little impact on your icing consistency.  But then again, I wouldn't have been able to enjoy the rest of that bottle of champagne!!!

OK, ready to pipe!  I decided to pipe roses onto my cupcakes.  To pipe a rose you're going to need a piping bag fit with the 1M or 2D piping tip.

So pretty.  The only thing left to do is try one!

Enjoy!!!