ALL ABOUT CUPCAKES

History of the Cupcake

Origin of Icing
     Icing, also called frosting in the United States, is a sweet often creamy glaze made ​​of sugar with a liquid, such as water or milk, that is often enriched with ingredients such as butter, egg whites, cream cheese, or flavorings. It is used to cover or decorate baked goods. Elizabeth Raffald the first documented recipe for icing in 1769 in the Experienced English Housekeeper, according to the Food Timeline. The simplest icing is a glace icing, containing powdered sugar and water. This can be flavored and colored as desired, for example, by using lemon juice in place of water. More complicated icings can be made ​​by beating fat into powdered sugar (as in buttercream), by melting fat and sugar together, by using egg whites (as in royal icing), and by adding other ingredients such as glycerin (as in fondant). Some icings can be made ​​from combinations of sugar and cream cheese or sour cream, or by using ground almonds (as in marzipan) .

Origin The Cupcake
      The first mention of the cupcake can be traced as far back as 1796, when a recipe notation of "a cake to be baked in small cups" was written in American Cookery by Amelia Simmons. The earliest documentation of the term cupcake was in "Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats" in 1828 in Eliza Leslie's Receipts cookbook. In the early 19th century, there were two different uses for the name cup cake or cupcake. In previous centuries, before muffin tins were widely available The cakes were often baked in individual pottery cups, ramekins, or molds and took their name from the cups they were baked in. This is the use of the name that has remained, and the name of "cupcake" is now given to any small cake that is about the size of a teacup. The name "fairy cake" is a fanciful description of its size, which would be appropriate for a party of diminutive fairies to share. While English fairy cakes vary in size more than American cupcakes, they are traditionally smaller and are rarely topped with elaborate icing. The other kind of "cup cake" referred to a cake whose ingredients were measured by volume, using a standard-sized cup, instead of being weighed. Recipes whose ingredients were measured using a standard sized cup could also be baked in cups; 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: one cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour and four eggs. They are plain yellow cakes, somewhat less rich and less expensive than pound cake, due to using about half as much butter and eggs compared to pound cake. 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 . Cupcakes have become more than a trend over the years, they've become an industry!

Origin of Cupcake Liners
     Paper baking cups first hit the US markets after the end of World War II. An artillery manufacturer called the James River Corporation began manufacturing cupcake liners for US markets when its military markets began to diminish. By 1969, they consolidated business as a paper manufacturing company and artillery left behind During the 1950s, the paper baking cup gained popularity as US housewives purchased them for convenience. Their flexibility grew when they realized that bakers could bake muffins as well as in the baking cups cupcakes.