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Cup Cakes
2/3 cup butter 1 cup milk 2 cups sugar 3 1/4 cups flour 4 eggs 4 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon mace Put butter and sugar in a bowl, and stir until well mixed; add eggs well beaten, then milk, and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder and mace. Bake in individual tins. Cover with Chocolate Frosting.
A plain 1-2-3-4 butter cake baked in small tins. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own patty pans, so the two things missing are a temperature and a yield.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Small butter cakes of this richness want a moderate oven, 350-375F, for 18-22 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the tops spring back.
- Individual tinsThese are patty pans or gem tins, close to a modern standard muffin tin. Grease and flour them, or use paper liners, and fill each about two-thirds full.
- YieldThe batter runs to roughly 24 standard cupcakes. Bake in two batches rather than crowding one pan.
- Creaming"Stir until well mixed" understates it. Beat the butter and sugar until pale and visibly lightened, three to four minutes with a mixer; together with the well-beaten eggs the recipe calls for, this is the aeration the cake gets beyond the baking powder.
- Eggs and curdlingFour beaten eggs added to creamed butter will often split the mixture. Add them in three or four additions, and take a spoonful of the measured flour in if it looks broken.
- Alternating the liquidsThe order as written -- all the milk, then all the flour -- gives a slack batter that is hard to bring together. Adding the flour mixture and the milk alternately, beginning and ending with flour, is easier and gives a finer crumb.
- MaceGround mace is the aril of the nutmeg, close to nutmeg in character but generally reckoned the more delicate of the two. A quarter teaspoon is deliberately faint; if you have none, grated nutmeg will stand in, used in a slightly smaller quantity.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to 3 1/4 cups of flour is heavier than modern practice. Period powders were single-acting and varied in formulation, though how far they were weaker than today's is not easily established. Three teaspoons of a current double-acting powder is nearer the mark and avoids a soapy aftertaste.
- The frostingThe chocolate frosting is a separate entry in the book. Any cooked or buttercream chocolate frosting suits; let the cakes cool completely first.
The name may have less to do with the tin than with the measure: a cup cake was a cake measured by the cupful rather than weighed on a balance -- the household shorthand of one cup butter, two sugar, three flour, four eggs, later known as 1-2-3-4 cake. Early references to cakes baked in small cups also exist, so the two senses are not cleanly separable. This version is a scaled variant of that formula, with the butter cut back and milk and baking powder carrying the difference. Cup measures spread in the United States well before they did in Britain, where weighing persisted, and the habit of baking the batter in small individual pans gradually attached the word "cupcake" to the shape as well as the method.