So which is it? There seems to be a very fine line between the two. I’ve been reading a lot of cupcake/muffin recipes lately due to the latest Is My Blog Burning event with the theme of cupcake and muffin recipes, and I honestly can’t decide what it is that differentiates a modern-day muffin from a cupcake, and vice versa.
Is it the frosting? It could be, but if I make a chocolate cake, and bake it in tiny cupcake cups, and then I omit the addition of delectable frosting (although I’m not sure why anyone would do that), do I have a muffin instead? I’m going to have to say no. But what about the ubiquitous chocolate chip muffin, or better yet the chocolate-chocolate chip muffin. These muffins are entirely sweet, made with a mainstay of the dessert cupboard– chocolate chips, so what is it about this breakfast treat that makes them indeed a breakfast treat, and not simply an after dinner addendum? Maybe it’s the addition of buttermilk. But not every morning muffin has buttermilk listed as an ingredient. Perhaps it’s the addition of some type of fruit that makes is a breakfast addition. But then there is the Poppyseed Muffin, no fruit there.
Feeling very much like I was preparing for Speech and Debate class in 7th grade, I resorted to The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), that veritable tome of all things English, and I offer you this: The OED doesn’t even offer a complete definition for the word cupcake, but favors the hyphenated: cup-cake. It defines this word as batter: “baked in a small open container or from ingredients measured in cupfuls.” Not really helpful. What sort of batter, any sweeteners, frosting? Not a mention. I turn the 1280 pages forward and try for the definition of muffin: “Originally a cake of any of various kinds of (esp. sweet) bread. Now a flat circular spongy cake of bread, often eaten toasted and buttered.” Also not really helpful; this appears to be the definition of an English Muffin.
Still unsatisfied I resorted to the trusty The Oxford Companion to Food (thank you Nishka) to see what Alan Davidson had to say about the matter. (I know that by my two reference books of choice it may seem that I am quite the anglophile, I assure you that I am not, but the English do know their reference books.) Davidson has not even a hyphen between this otherwise contracted word, it is simply written as– cup cake. He states that a cup cake is “the name given in Britain and generally the USA to any small cake baked in a cup-shaped mould or in a paper baking cup.” No mention of a muffin also being baked in this same mould. Then he goes on to tell us about Elizabeth Ellicot Lea’s baking of a rather large pound cake in 1845, when the term cup cake was used to describe the units of measurement. Sheesh, now I am thoroughly lost. A pound cake? Correct me if I am wrong, but pound cakes do not even have frosting, a glaze maybe, but usually not frosting. Besides the historical reference, it seems to me that pound cakes have very little to do with cupcakes. If we take The Oxford Companion to Food’s definition, a cup cake, is anything baked in a cupcake pan.
On to the muffins, yet furthering the conundrum. After a rather lengthy definition of the English Muffin being very popular 19th century snack, synonymous with crumpets and pikelets, Davidson addresses the American muffin more directly as a “generally small, squat, round cake which may be yeast leavened, although baking powder is used in many recipes. It is usually sweetened with a little sugar. These muffins may be plain, but are often flavored with fruit, nuts, or savoury ingredients…American muffins, still extremely popular, are oven baked in muffin pans, or cups and are served primarily for breakfast or as an accompaniments to dinner.” Please, Davidson does so much back-talking in this definition: they’re sweet, no savory; plain, no adorned; you eat them for breakfast…and dinner. It’s becoming clear that even he is unsure what makes a muffin. If we had a plain muffin as is said in this definition, what’s to say it would not simply be an unfrosted, vanilla cupcake?
The wheel of Ixion rolls on.
