Cupcake

For the episode of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, see Cupcake (How I Met Your Mother).

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A cupcake (the common US term) or fairy cake (the common British term, although it is now used interchangeably with the US term) is a small cake designed to serve one person, frequently baked in a small paper cup.

As with larger cakes, frosting and other cake decorations, such as sprinkles, are common on cupcakes.

History

The name of "cupcake" is given as it is a small cake the size of a teacup. In previous centuries, before muffin tins were widely available, the cakes were often baked in individual pottery cups, ramekins, or molds. The name "fairy cake" is a fanciful description of its size, which would be appropriate for a party of diminutive fairies to share.

Cupcakes are often served during a celebration, such as children's birthday parties. Additionally, they can be served as an accompaniment to afternoon tea. They are a more convenient alternative to a large cake as they don't require utensils or division into individual portions.

Cupcake recipes

A standard cupcake uses the same basic ingredients as standard-sized cakes: butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. Nearly any recipe that is suitable for a layer cake can be used to bake cupcakes.

Recipes for "cup cake" — recipes whose ingredients were measured using a standard-sized cup, instead of weighing the ingredients — have a confusingly similar name. These cakes could also be baked in bowls; however, they were more commonly baked in tins as layers or loaves. In later years, when the use of volume measurements was firmly established in home kitchens, these recipes became known as 1234 cakes or quarter cakes, so called because they are made up of four ingredients in equal ratios; butter, sugar, eggs and flour. They are plain yellow cakes, somewhat less rich and less expensive than pound cake due to the reduced proportion of butter. The names of these two major classes of cakes were intended to signal the method to the baker; "cup cake" uses a volume measurement, and "pound cake" uses a weight measurement.

Pans and liners

Originally, cupcakes were baked in heavy pottery cups. Some bakers still use individual ramekins, small coffee mugs, or other small ovenproof pottery-type dishes for baking cupcakes.

Specialized pans are made for baking cupcakes. In some instances, cupcake pans may be slightly smaller than muffin tins, but most households use the same baking pans for both. These ovenproof pans are most often made from metal and generally have six or twelve depressions or "cups". They may also be made from stoneware, silicone rubber, or other materials. A standard size cup is three inches in diameter and holds about four ounces, although both pans for both miniature and jumbo size cupcakes exist. Specialty pans may offer many different sizes and shapes.

A recent innovation is a silicone cake pan with varied shapes of cups to form a large design, such as a butterfly. Similar to this approach, some bakers place standard cupcakes into a pattern and frost them to create a large design, such as a basket of flowers or a turtle.

Individual cups, or cupcake liners, may be used in baking. These are typically round sheets of thin paper pressed into a round, fluted cup shape. Liners can facilitate the easy removal of the cupcake from the tin after baking, keep the cupcake moister, and reduce the effort needed to clean the pan. The use of liners is also considered a more sanitary option when cupcakes are being passed from hand to hand. Like cupcake pans, several sizes of paper liners are available, from miniature to jumbo.

In addition to paper, cupcake liners may be made from very thin aluminum foil or, in a non-disposable version, silicone rubber. Because they can stand up on their own, foil and silicone liners can also be used on a flat baking sheet, which makes them popular among people who do not have a specialized muffin tin. Some of the largest paper liners are not fluted and are made out of thicker paper, often rolled at the top edge for additional strength, so that they can also stand independently for baking without a cupcake tin. Some bakers use two or three thin paper liners, nested together, to simulate the strength of a single foil cup.

See also

• Petit fours, individual-sized or bite-sized cakes made by cutting a large sheet cake and frosting the pieces
• Muffins, which, in the American style, are less sweet than cupcakes but otherwise similar
• Tea cake, a broad class of breads and cakes served with tea
• Butterfly cake, a cupcake that has been cut and reassembled to suggest the shape of a butterfly

External links

• BBC Food - sample fairycake (cupcake) recipe