13th Mar 2008
                                                                   Thursday
Cupcake at first bite

Today, out of curiousity about cupcakes, I decided to find out the difference between cupcakes and muffins because all this while (due to ignorance, I admit), I had thought they were the same, well, more or less the same. For the third class during Course 1 (Wilton's), we were supposed to bring 8 or 10 cupcakes. Well, I baked muffins and when I went for class, I wondered why the other student's cupcakes looked different from mine.

Anyway, back to today's events, I googled "are cupcakes the same as muffins?" and the search came up. The first link brought me to PrettyRandomThings, a blog 'from a frustrated Martha Stewart wannabe who's in love with just about anything purty'. Well, the blogger explained the difference between cupcakes and muffins .... aaahhhh ... i seeee ... There were interesting comments under her blog on the topic of "Cupcakes vs Muffins". I even asked my husband what the difference was, which, of course, he couldn't answer, "I just eat them, I don't ask them what they are."

Another link brought me to Yahoo!Answers where someone had posted this question, "What does "Muffins are just ugly cupcakes mean??" Some of the answers to that question was amusing:

• Cupcakes have pizzazz because they have icing and sprinkles ... muffins are just like "Blah." so boring and no spice ...
• muffins are cupcakes that have gained a little weight ...
• ...um pretty self-explanatory ...

But I liked the explanation of why cupcakes would win over muffins from the first link.

The third link I visited led me to another blogsite
Cupcakes Takes the Cake which had this Q and A on this very subject from WESH.com:

Q: I purchased chocolate, chocolate chip muffins from local grocery store. My husband said they weren't muffins they were cupcakes. I asked the bakery department. They didn't know difference, but said what I purchased was muffins. What is the difference between muffins and cupcakes? --Maureen

A: The quick-and-dirty answer on this is that cupcakes have frosting, whereas muffins do not. However, in researching, I found an excellent formulaic definition of the difference courtesy of Diana's Desserts: "A basic formula for muffins is 2 cups flour, 2-4 tablespoons sugar, 2½ teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, 1 egg, ¼ cup oil, shortening or butter and 1 cup milk. When the fat, sugar and egg ratio in a recipe reaches double or more than this, you have reached the cake level."

Interesting explanation. Well, enough on cupcakes and muffins, I went on to google cupcake recipes and found one 'Devil Food Cupcake Recipe' which I baked and found it very nice. I had cut down the amount of sugar and it still tasted great. Instead of icing it as I wasn't in much of a mood to mix the icing, I had just sprinkled icing sugar over them. The second site (which I have listed) actually had cool cupcake decorations. I will definitely visit it again for ideas for decorating my cupcakes.

My husband tried out the cupcakes and he said, "No more muffins for me!" Well, seeing as how both of us like eating cakes, I suppose cupcakes would have won hands down.

Knitting Links
Knittinghelp.com

Cooking Links
The Soup Queen
Learning Herbs

Baking Links
Cupcake Recipes.Net

Lootbags
If you are interested in lootbags, here is a link to a list of items.

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