Hannah Spannari then looked to one side and saw her partner of two years, Richard Pineros, down on one knee.

“Someone said to me, ‘what toy did you get?’ and I thought ‘who cares’,” Ms Spannari said.

“Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw this glistening diamond and I screamed and jumped up and down.

“I hadn’t been expecting it at all — it was a total shock.

“I said ‘absolutely yes’.”

Ms Spannari, a family day care educator, said her whole family had been in on the set-up, with her podiatrist brother using his knife skills to doctor the bonbon to put the ring inside.

“It was just special knowing that my family had been part of it all, especially at Christmas,” she said.

“My grandfather had tears well in his eyes and my grandmother said, ‘finally someone is getting married’.”

Ms Spannari said she and Mr Pineros, a Colombian national who works at the Telstra shop in Dean Street, were planning to marry in the new year.

She said their parents Aki and Andrea Spannari, of Thurgoona, and Edgard Pineros and Elsa Barrios, of Bogota, Colombia, were delighted by the news.