Let me tell you a story. The other day I went to the Bagel Store in Williamsburg and ordered a bagel and coffee. The bagel was delicious, but the coffee was too hot so I barely put a dent in it. In the display was a beautiful chocolate chip muffin, so I decided to it as well. I asked the guy behind the counter for it and he looks at me and says “Do you mean the French vanilla muffin?”
“I do if it’s the one with the chocolate chips in it.”
So he gets it out and I pay for it, but as I’m eating it and marveling at how sweet the thing is, I wondered if this wasn’t, in actuality, a cupcake. What’s the difference between a muffin and a cupcake? Is one healthy and the other not? Is it a cupcake when it’s served at a 5th birthday but a muffin otherwise?
“I must know!” I cried and ran out of the store.
I knew the answer lay in the ingredients. The etymology of cupcakes suggests they are simply cup sized cakes. Muffins on the other hand, have no etymology and remained a mystery. But by thinking of words associated with muffin, such as corn muffin, bran muffin, the muffin man, I could tell there was a fundamental difference in what goes into each.
Diana’s Desserts has a pretty good description of the difference:
A basic formula for muffins is 2 cups flour, 2-4 tablespoons sugar, 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 egg, 1/4 cup oil, shortening or butter, 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.
So a cupcake is really just a fat, sweet muffin. That’s about what I thought. Unfortunately there�s no muffin watchdog group (yet) to police these bakeries and bagel shops. So the next time you order a chocolate chip ran muffin, think twice. It’s probably a chocolate chip bran cupcake.
I’ve had a few corn muffins lately and they have been really sweet– and cake like.
Really though the philosophical question you are asking is, what’s the difference between bread and cake and things in between.
Think about a nice banana or pumpkin bread: its very dense like cake, but not so sweet.
Banana bread probably gets its name from its shape, not from its ingredients. I’m pretty sure you don’t need yeast to make a banana bread rise first. In general breads are levened, they have yeast. Cakes don’t. Are there sweet yeast products out there? Unsweetened yeastless ones too?
That is somewhat true– a banana bread is a batter rather than a dough. Yeast is one way of making bread rise, but so is baking soda. Essentially, anything that causes the release of carbon dioxide as you bake it creates a lighter fluffy bread or cake. Most cakes also have at least baking soda.
And what about a pie? Cakes are round breads that are sweet. A pie is round and sweet, so does that make it a cake? If I were to bake a chocolate cake in a long rectangular bread pan, would that be chocolate bread? And finally, if I were to bake a cherry pie in a bread pan, would that be a cherry bread?
what the hell is with the muffin ads?
i dont there is a difference they both can be sweet and they both can taste the same
Cupcakes have frosting and are fluffier than muffins. Large muffins (the kind you usually see in coffeeshops, etc.) have *more* calories and fat than cupcakes, which are, in fact, yummier. This has been scientifically proven. By me. :-)
Eat more cupcakes!
I was wondering the EXACT same thing - and found your post upon googling “muffin vs. cupcake.”
It’s killing me. I’m gonna do some serious homework on this. Cuz I feel like I”m gonna cry and run out also if I don’t figure it out.
I don’t buy that the only difference is frosting. I know a cupcake is lighter and fluffier because it’s essentially a cake. And yes a muffin is denser, blah blah blah.
But I want to understand the etymology and origin of the muffin. Which came first? (I’m guessing the cupcake.) Did one derive from the other, and why? For now, my suspicion is that one day, somebody wanted to have a cupcake for breakfast, but felt guilty about doing so, so invented something and called it a muffin…so that he/she could eat a dessert for breakfast and not feel guilty. ??
So I was just at Starbucks and had a similar experience with a beautiful chocolate muffin. I Googled “muffin vs. cupcake” and found your postings. While I was reading a friend called. I asked her the great questions, “Do you know what the difference is between a muffin and a cupcake?” She had the answer, “Frosting, cupcakes have it, muffins don’t”. Now I don’t know if this is the true and final answer to the powerful issue but its good enough for me.
That’s not good enough for me. What happens if you make a bran muffin, and put frosting on it? Or make a cupcake and leave teh frosting off? The presence of frosting is definitely correlated with cupcakes, but it is not the defining feature. Sorry.
i have had a debate with friends on whether or not a muffin is in the cupcake family and they definately are not one. a cupcake is in the cake family and a muffin is in the bread family according to many definitions that i have found and on further note a bread contains yeast and a cupcake does not have that for sure. they are different things.
Well, I actually just googled the etymology of cupcakes, and stumbled across this page (funny how someone can say you stumbled ove something that isn’t real, you’re not physically stumbling on it? anyways…) Would have been nice when cupcakes were first called “Cupcake” maybe ine some royal kitchen in france in the 1600’s , i guess that words never had too much attention. But this was an itneresting question and never thought about it until the stumbling and the reading. I’ll be more alert for muffin fraud now. Thanks!