Muffin vs. cupcake

From another thread:

We all know what a cupcake is: a minature cake baked in a muffin tin. And we know a muffin is a muffin, right? But there seems to be a little overlap. A cupcake made in your typical muffin tin is a cupcake. But make it bigger and it’s suddenly a muffin. What are the criteria for determining muffinness or cupcakeness?

It can’t just be size. Most cornbread muffins I see are cupcake-sized. (Though it’s not really fair of me to bring that up, as cornbread is different from cake.) A chocolate muffin you buy at the convenience store is denser than a cupcake. But is that because it’s a ‘muffin’? Or because you bought it at a convenience store instead of making it yourself or buying it at a bakery? Cupcakes seem to be more traditional ‘cakes’, while muffins often have blueberries, currants or raisins, chocolate chips, or whatever in them.

To me the criterion seems to be the presence of icing. If it has icing it’s a cupcake, and if it doesn’t it’s a muffin.

Traditionally, muffins didn’t have nearly the amount of sugar that a cake does. When I make muffins, I use a regular cookbook recipe, and a batch calls for 1 3/4 cup flour and 1/4 cup sugar. Then you put in a bunch of fruit of some sort, and the result is a fruity bread suitable for breakfast–possibly not the healthiest item ever, but not a dessert. They aren’t generally as light and moist as cake, since there’s less oil and leavening.

Then bakeries discovered that if they put lots of sugar in the muffins and filled them up with chocolate chips and streusel and made them extra-big, people would buy a gazillion of them and pretend that they were regular breakfast muffins, when in fact they are pretty much cake with a bit of fruit in, though possibly with more oil to make the denser texture moist and yummy.

So, my vote is that modern bakery muffins are not, in fact, muffins at all–they’re more a heavy cake, something of a hybrid between the two.

A muffin is a quick bread, which is made by combining all the dry ingredients (including sugar) together, including the leavening, dumping the liquid ingredients in (which contain the fat), mixing them very quickly and not especially thoroughly, and baking them at a fairly high temperature so they rise well.

A cupcake is a small cake, which is made by creaming fat and sugar together, then adding liquid and dry ingredients alternately, mixing very thoroughly for lightness, and baking them at a lower temperature for tenderness and a soft crumb.

The egg/fat/sugar ratio in a cake is also nearly twice what it is in a quick bread.

Same as the difference between chocolate covered granola bars vs. chocolate bars: You are supposed to eat the first one for breakfast and the other one for dessert.

Alton? Is that you?

hmm?
I thought Cupcake has frosting, muffin does not.

Do fruit and or nuts Help tip the balance towards ‘muffin’ ?

No, as above, muffins and cake are two different categories of things. Muffins are a kind of quick bread (like banana bread, zucchini bread, etc.), and cake is cake. They are made differently, and the procedure (as well as the ingredient ratio) is what makes them two different things.

Ok, it’s clear that an unfrosted cupcake does not = a muffin, but is it still a cupcake?

When I was growing up, a cupcake was really a miniature cake, always chocolate and with icing or frosting, whichever word you choose to use, on top. A muffin was not sweet, like cornbread muffins.

Now at places like Starbucks, there are blueberry and banana muffins among others, and they are more of a dessert thing. But to me “chocolate cupcake” will always be redundant.

Correct. As mentioned above, they’re two different things. A cupcake is a cake. A muffin is a bread.

I am not a bread. I am a human bean.

I know! My heart done skipped a beat there… :smiley: