Cupcakes are the “New” Muffins
Muffins have had a good run.
For about 20 years the favourite pick for cake-on-the-run, cake-at-the-coffee-shop, or take-back-to-the-office-cake were muffins. It also helped a bit that there was a belief that muffins were also healthy.
“Real” muffins probably even were marginally more healthy. They typically complied with at least four of the following nine attributes:
- vegetable oil in place of butters or full-cream fats,
- water in place of milk,
- high-fibre or wholemeal flours in place of refined white flour,
- cereals (examples I have come across include oat muffins, whole wheat muffins, and sunflower seed muffins),
- fruits (one of my favourite muffins when I worked in the city was a banana and honey muffin and I also liked the date and wheet-bix muffin),
- “natural” sweeteners such as added raisins or sultana or they would just rely on the sweetness of the contents (apple, banana, etc.,),
- nuts,
- even vegetables (in my time I have eaten carrot, pumpkin, and zucchini muffins and even once a potato muffin), and
- real muffins don’t have frosting or icing on them.
Not all muffins sold as muffins are/were muffins. Many were just cakes being called muffins. There is a difference. Apart from the yeast aspect mentioned above, a “real” muffin is rough and ready and sort of stodgy. It is a coarse dry-ish batter mix and not fluffy or aerated like a cake. When you mix the muffin mix you barely give it five or six turns with the spoon—just enough to wet all the mix. Then whack it in the patties or the muffin tray and put it in the oven.
If your muffin instructions tell you something like “beat for 5 minutes” then you are not making muffins. They’re cakes. And if the mix is not at least a quarter fruit or vegetable or cereal or nuts then, again, you are not making muffins; they’re cakes. If the finished batter is looking very wet and even slightly runny like you could pour it from the mixing bowl then that is a cake mix and you won’t be making muffins with that.
But it seems the era of the muffin is over. On the radio, 94.5 I think it was, they went on for a whole drive-home session about cupcakes and how awesome they are—in between the music.
It seems cupcakes are happening big time, worldwide. We have all become bored with the “healthy” muffin.
Cupcakes are always frosted or iced and the icing can be seriously awesome too, both in design and flavours.
Cupcakes come in a variety of very useful sizes from about 1.5” in diameter up to mini-cake size of about 4” in diameter.
Apparently cupcakes smell good. So good that even just opening the lid on a 4-pack of cupcakes and getting a wiff of the aroma that wafts up can be an experience you just want to do over and over again.
You won’t be encountering any of those boring natural sweeteners in cupcakes. None of your raisins or sultanas or honey or over-ripe bananas in there to sweeten them up. Nope. Just refined sugar. Maybe, at best, half white sugar and half brown sugar.
And no sliced orange or apple or banana on top. Nope. Frosting, sweetened cream, and icing.
Based on the radio show I listened to, smartphone users don’t eat muffins; they eat cupcakes. If you see someone in a coffee shop ordering a muffin—assuming they even still sell muffins—then you can bet your favourite pair of high heels (it was obviously a woman saying this) that their phone can’t browse the Web.
If you are wanting to do more research on cupcakes then you can check out “20 Most Inventive Cupcakes Known To Man” (here) or “The Top 10 Reasons Why We Love Cupcakes” (here)—and I resisted adding ‘use Ctrl+Click on those links to open them in a new Tab’ because you must be getting bored with that by now.
What do you call a muffin with nothing lumpy in it and icing on top?
A cupcake.