Cupcake History 101

Happy Cupcake Week everyone! It is going to be such a great week. Lolly and I are co-hosting this week and have been working for the past several months getting ready (and probably gained several pounds). We hope you’re as excited about it as we are! This week will be filled to the bursting point with cupcake ideas, cupcake recipes, and cupcake crafts. To help you navigate between our two blogs so that you don’t miss a crumb of cupcake excitement, we will be providing you with flip and flop buttons at the bottom of each post (so you can flip flop between the two, ha, ha, ha, ha!).

So cupcakes. Where did these little bundles of joy get their start? Not a whole lot is known about the history of cupcakes. From what I could piece together from various sources, little individual portions of cake were already popular by the 18th century. Between this time and the present, certain factors influenced cooking to bring us the present incarnation of our beloved cupcake. One of these factors was a change in cooking methods. For a long time ingredients to be used were weighed. Then came the revolutionary idea of measuring out ingredients with standard sized cups, saving TONS of time in the kitchen. Thus, a cake made using cups, aka, a cup cake.

Food Timeline explains, “Old cookbooks also sometimes mention baking cakes in small cups. These cups may very well have been earthenware tea cups or other small clay baking pans. These would easily have accommdated baking level oven heat and produce individual-sized cakes.” Thus another form of cup cake–a small cake baked in a cup.

An article on Suite101 explains that, “One of the earliest records comes from the Fanny Merritt Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. In this book the cook is instructed to bake individual cakes in tin cups. Paper liners were not used until just after World War I when the James River Corporation manufactured cupcake liners on machines that a few years before were making artillery shells. Commercial cupcakes reached the market some time before World War II. Hostess introduced the Hostess Cupcake in the 1950’s.”

Whoever the other geniuses were that influenced the history of baking to bring about cupcakes, I am in their debt.

Here’s a sneak peak at what’s coming up here on LFM for the rest of the week!!!

P.S. If you flop over to Lolly’s place, you’ll get to see and drool over the first recipe of the week for mint cupcakes with mint icing and marshmallow fondant icing!

Tagged as: Cupcake Week