Drunk Desserts: White Wine Cupcakes with Riesling

If you know me, you probably know that I love cupcakes. If you read this blog, you also know that I love wine. Naturally, I wanted to combine these tasty interests. 

After some quick googling on the matter, I found a small handful of recipes that seemed to fit the bill. I decided to make white Riesling cupcakes with a white chocolate and Riesling icing. Here is the recipe I used, along with some minor adjustments I made along the way.

Ingredients

1/4 cup butter (I used margarine) 

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 cup sweet white wine (Riesling or Moscato are good choices; I also added an extra splash of wine because my batter seemed thick)

2 egg whites

Frosting:

1/2 cup chopped white chocolate

1 stick butter

2.5 cups powdered sugar

2 tbsp white wine

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit (177 Celsius)

2. In a medium-sized bowl, cream together butter and sugar, then add wine

3. In a large bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt; then add wet ingredients

4. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs to a stiff peak and fold into batter 

5. Fill cupcake liners 3/4 of the way full and bake for 10-15 minutes

6. To make the frosting, melt white chocolate and cream it together with butter

7. Add powdered sugar and wine until desired consistency is reached

8. When cupcakes cool, pipe on the frosting

Original Recipe @ Cupcakes for Dinner

Starting to gather ingredients 

All baked and funny-looking

 A few tips from my experience:

• You're definitely going to want to use an electric mixer to beat the eggs into stiff peaks. Don't make the mistake that I did and assume that you have the superhuman arm strength and endurance to do this by hand. 
• I only made about half of the suggested icing recipe, initially because I ran out of icing sugar. However, I found that these cupcakes didn't need a huge amount of icing, especially with the icing being so rich and heavy because of the white chocolate. 
• I used Peller Estates 2013 Riesling in this recipe. Although this is a fairly dry wine, I think it worked out nicely. The Riesling adds some lovely tropical fruit flavours to the white cupcakes, and there is enough sugar in the recipe to keep it sweet.

Good news: since this recipe only calls for slightly more than 1/4 cup of wine, you'll have lots leftover for drinking. Yay! This is the new 2013 vintage of Peller Estates Riesling, and it's nice to sip on as well. It's a dry, medium-bodied white, which you may not expect from a Riesling. I found it a little bit tart with tropical fruit flavours of pineapple and lemon. It retails for $11.95 and can be found at The Wine Shop in Ontario. 

And finally, the finished product! 

Thanks for reading, fellow wine and sweets lovers!