The Great Muffin Experiment, No. 1 (Jump to the Recipe)

Sometimes when I bake cupcakes, Kin will call them "muffins" just to annoy me. "They're cupcakes," I insist. "Are they?" he'll tease.

Are they, indeed. What exactly is a muffin, and how is it different than a cupcake? Or is it?

It's easy to joke about confusing the two. Both are baked in muffin tins — muffin tins often lined with cupcake papers. And the etymology doesn't help clarify things — a cake baked in a cup seems obvious. But the word "muffin" is possibly derived from the Low German "muffen," plural of "muffe" or "small cake." Possibly, etymologists say, because what we know now as the small cake-like muffin is different from the small yeasted bread known as the crumpet or English muffin. It's confusing! (But Kin's jokes still aren't funny.)

There are, of course, ways we can and do distinguish the two: cupcakes can be frosted, for example; muffins are less likely to be, although they can be glazed. Muffins purport to be healthy; you can get away with eating one for breakfast, while it's generally frowned upon to eat a cupcake for the first meal of the day. I say "purport to be healthy," because muffins are still quite sweet and even with "healthy" additions like flax seed and oats and dried fruit, they can contain about as much sugar and fat as a cupcake. There are, for what it's worth, about 440 calories in the Starbucks Chocolate Chunk Muffin.

In fact, the difference between a muffin and a cupcake is not in the ingredients or the calories or the topping or the time of day they're consumed. Rather, the difference is in how the batter is assembled. Cupcakes are, as the name suggests, typically made the same way that cakes are: by creaming the butter and sugar, then adding the eggs and beating until light and fluffy. The dry ingredients — flour, salt, and baking powder, for example — are then added alternately with milk. Muffins are more akin to a quick bread insofar as the dry ingredients (including the sugar) are mixed together; the wet ingredients are mixed together separately; and then the two are combined quickly, without too much stirring, which would develop gluten and make the muffins chewy. Lumps are bad in your cake batter; lumps are fine in your muffin batter.

(This distinction works well right up until you consider all the "just add water" varieties of "instant" (read: microwavable) mixes. Then, I guess, it's quick breads all the way down.)

As part of The Great Muffin Experiment, I will be making a variety of muffins in my quest for the perfect, "healthy" muffin. But let's start without any preconceived notion of what's "healthy" — I'll write about that next — and look and what goes into your basic muffin.

Basic Muffin

This is based on the basic muffin recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything cookbook.

Prep time: 10 minutes  ·  Cooking time: 20 minutes  ·  Servings: 12  ·  Calories: 133

Ingredients:

• 3 Tbps melted butter
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1 egg
• 1 cup milk, plus more if needed

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 400 F. Line 12 compartments of standard muffin tin with paper (or grease tin).
2. Mix together the dry ingredients in a bowl.
3. Beat the melted butter, egg, and milk in a bowl.
4. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add the wet ingredients. Stir swiftly, until combined. The batter should be lumpy, not smooth but quite moist. Add more milk if necessary.
5. Spoon batter into muffin tins, filling about two-thirds full.
6. Bake 18 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.
7. Cool for 5 minutes before taking out of the tin.

Some Baking Notes

If we think of this as the "ur" muffin — a stretch, but bear with me — then there's lots of room for exploration and - apologies to Mark Bittman - improvement. All the ingredients are variables to be played with — more or different sugar, different flour, different fat, for starters. And that's some of what I'll explore throughout The Great Muffin Experiment.

But "ur" muffin or not, I found these to be quite bland, not surprisingly. I wouldn't complain too much about the level of sweetness, but the only real flavor came from the butter. The texture of the muffin was fine — perhaps a little dry. (I could have added more milk, I suppose, as Bittman recommends. I also could have cooked them a bit less than what the recipe called for, I think.) The biggest drawback, however, was that these didn't freeze well, which is something I am definitely looking for as I cannot eat a dozen muffins that quickly.

(As such, I now have 10 rather dull and dry muffins that I have to do something with. How about bread muffin pudding?!)