Cup Cakes
⅔ cup butter 2 cups sugar 4 eggs 1 cup milk 3¼ cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder ¼ 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 1-2-3-4 style batter set in small tins. Two numbers in the text have lost their fractions in transcription, and they are the first thing to fix.
- The proportionsThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for 3¼ cups flour and ¼ teaspoon mace, as given here. Two cups of sugar to 3¼ cups flour is a normal proportion for the period, and the result is sweeter than a modern cupcake.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Around 375F for 18 to 22 minutes suits cakes this size; bake until a pick comes out clean and the tops spring back.
- Butter and sugar"Stir until well mixed" understates it. Use softened, not melted, butter and beat until visibly pale and fluffy — the aeration here is doing work that the 4 teaspoons of baking powder alone will not do.
- Eggs well beatenBeat the four eggs to a foam before they go in, as written, and add them in two or three additions. All at once into a half-cup of butter can break the mixture.
- MaceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed — warmer and less sharp than nutmeg itself. It is the only flavouring in the cake and it matters; buy it ground and recent, or grate a little nutmeg as a substitute.
- Tins"Individual tins" here means small gem or muffin pans, greased. Fill two-thirds full. Paper cases work fine and make a cleaner cake.
- YieldAbout 24 to 30 cakes, depending on tin size. Frost only once fully cool, or the chocolate frosting will slide.
The name is generally traced not to the shape of the tin but to the method of measuring: a cup cake was a cake measured in cupfuls rather than weighed on a balance, at a time when few American kitchens owned scales and every kitchen owned a teacup. That reading is better supported than the competing and widely repeated explanation that such cakes were baked in cups, though the latter cannot be ruled out. The related "1-2-3-4 cake" — one cup butter, two sugar, three flour, four eggs — is the same idea reduced to a number you could remember without a book, and this formula is a half-butter version of it. Fannie Farmer popularised and codified the standardised level cup, in the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book and its many revisions, building on standardisation efforts that predate her, and it is why a recipe this bare still works. The instruction to bake in individual tins rather than one loaf reflects the growing availability of stamped tinware gem pans in the late nineteenth century.