Valentine's Day Cupcakes -- and They Have Wine in Them!

Who doesn’t love Valentine’s Day cupcakes, berries, chocolate and wine?

Using a bottle of San Antonio Winery’s Stella Rosa Black, a low-alcohol wine that’s both bubbly and pretty, I created new Valentine’s Day cupcakes with a specially crafted recipe that’s easy, inexpensive and will surprise your special significant other. Thank you, San Antonio Winery, for the complimentary wine! Stella Rosa Black is a blend of several varietals and includes the flavors of ripe blackberry, blueberry and raspberry. What a perfect Valentine’s Day wine, right? To put it in Valentine’s Day cupcakes? Even better!

I took a very basic <pale> yellow cupcake batter that I’ve tweaked throughout the years, cored out the centers and filled them with an organic jam infused with the Stella Rosa Black wine, and covered them in big piles of wine-infused buttercream. You can’t go wrong! (The wine is not cooked out though, so while the alcohol level is low, I made these with adults in mind only.)

Wine-Infused Jam-Filled Yellow Cupcakes with Red Wine Buttercream

Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees. Put liners in 24-26 cupcake wells in your favorite cupcake pans. (I love Wilton because they have the little handles that stick out and make it easier to remove the pans from the oven without putting the thumb from your oven mitt into a cupcake!)

Ingredients

Cupcakes
2 1/2 cups white flour (I used non-bleached all-purpose white)

2 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt (I tend to do salt on the higher end, it can really help punch up the flavor in a very subtle way)

2 sticks of softened butter (I recommend against margarine, use the real butter if you can)

1 1/2 cups sugar

3 whole eggs, room temperature

2/3 cup milk

Mix the dry ingredients. Set aside.

Cream the butter; keep it mixing until it’s as fluffy as you can get it. Slowly pour in the sugar until it’s all combined without being gritty. Add in the eggs, one at a time.

Add in 1/2 of the flour mixture and 1/2 of the milk. Mix until combined. Repeat until the flour mixture and milk are gone.

Fill cupcake liners 2/3 with batter. I do this by putting in a slightly overfilled ice cream scoop.

Bake at 18 minutes. Check — you may need 1-2 more minutes, but my oven runs a little hot so 17-18 minutes was perfect.

Cool for a few minutes before removing each from the cupcake pans and placing on a rack.

Jam Filling and Hidden Surprise

3/4 cup of your favorite jam — I used organic Cherry-Pomegranate Jam, from Costco

1/2 cup wine

1/2 cup chocolate chips

Mix the jam and wine together completely. Set aside. Leave chips for use later.

After the cupcakes are completely, core out the centers. Drop in 3-4 chips in each well, then fill with the jam mixture.

Buttercream Frosting

4 sticks of butter, room temperature

9 cups of confectioner’s sugar

1/2 cup red wine (approximate)

Cream the butter until fluffy. Slowly add in the 9 cups of sugar. Add in the red wine slowly, mixing after each 1/4 cup and stop when it gets to the proper consistency. I added about 1/2 cup plus a couple of tablespoons and it was perfect.

Pipe on the frosting, and add a few more chocolate chips to the top as decoration to your liking.