Last year, I wrote about how I made my fiancé's 25th birthday a little bit more special by arranging a whole-family party, staying up until he fell asleep at 3am to decorate the house for him to wake up to, and ordering in a birthday cake and afternoon tea. Luckily this year, we were able to see some of his family members the day before, (as he had to work on his actual birthday, boo capitalism), which was super lovely, but some elements did stay the same! Read on for a very interesting prosecco and cookies and cream cupcake recipe.
One thing that did stay the same is that I went all out on the decorations again - during the daytime this time, but there were definitely more of them. As I told Stephen that I wanted to bake some cupcakes for him, and he had requested that we try out the prosecco flavouring that we bought a while ago, but hadn't figured out a way to use yet, I thought I'd do something with that. We'd run out of unsalted butter, so I sent him out to our local corner shop to grab some. He then came home to giant rose gold '26' number balloons sat on the sofa, a lone silver heart balloon and two strips of bunting placed in the living room.
Much of it was bought the party section of our local WH Smith, including: the pretty pink 'sip sip hooray' which was bought for my virtual hen do photoshoot, the rose gold '26' number balloons which I bought for myself for my birthday last year because I just couldn't resist them, and the silver heart balloon which we bought for this year's Valentine's Day photoshoot. The rose gold bunting is from Ginger Ray, which is an incredible store with SO many pretty things, especially if you're also getting married. I had actually ordered some gorgeous flower-filled balloons from there too, but sadly, they didn't arrive in time.
On to the dessert! As I mentioned, Stephen knew that he wanted us to try to find a recipe which included prosecco flavouring so that we could try it out, after months of it being in my baking cupboard untouched. If you know me, then you already know what I'm about to say...
I went to the Jane's Patisserie website.
It took literal seconds to find a fun prosecco cupcake recipe, because she is an actual Queen and has made and blogged about any dessert that I've ever craved in my life. We also thought it would be fun to add something special into them as it was for his birthday, so we added a bar of chopped up Cadbury's White Oreo chocolate.
First of all, I'd never seen this chocolate bar in stores before and it was delicious?! I don't know if it's actually new or not, but if you haven't tried it, do.
Other than adding the chocolate choppings into the batter, I followed this recipe exactly, and they turned out so beautifully sweet, with that slight alcoholic aftertaste which gives them a little more depth to the flavouring. I'd never made anything with a drizzle before either, but it was super simple to do!
I'm genuinely so happy with how they came out because I have to be honest, I tried to make raspberry and white chocolate cookies for my in-laws last weekend, and me being me, I'd never used frozen fruit in a recipe before and decided to go in without having tested the recipe before making it for them. The raspberries melted into the batter super quickly, turned it bright pink, and I kid you not, the cookies looked like brains. I ended up binning them and re-making them as simple white chocolate cookies, so I'm VERY pleased that I didn't have another baking disaster again this time. Maybe I haven't lost my baking MOJO after all.
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