There's no bad time to sit down and engage in copious amounts of baking. That said, there's something about the subtle chill of autumn that makes baking especially inviting. It also helps that September is the most popular month to be born in.
For your next festive occasion, be it a seasonal holiday or the joyous anniversary of your special someone, desserts are in order. How do you make a decision between cupcake vs cake to mark the occasion with sugar, color, and mirth?
For the health-conscious, cupcakes seem a clear choice, with their bietes-sized dimensions allowing for better portion control. Decades of food television and videos have also set the bar high on how decorative a decorative cake really needs to be.
To make a decision of this magnitude, you'll need to get into the nitty-gritty (which in cake, is always sugar and butter) to arrive at a solution.
Cupcake vs Cake
Bottom line, you find yourself in the presence of either sweet confectionary, you're likely having a good time. Cake doesn't randomly appear in the middle of uneventful days.
While the two tasty treats share more similarities than not, the key differences make them rise to your particular special occasion. There's more than one factor that goes into the preparation so you can't simply scoop batter into cups and assume it will all turn out the same.
The following variations in preparation, baking technique, and ingredients are presented in no particular order. They are presented with a literary flair to match the hopefully festive occasion your spongy treat will soon take center stage at.
By Crumb
One thing that distinguishes what is commonly called cake from bread is the crumb consistency. Sweetness, moistness, and flavors like vanilla, chocolate, or fruit are all descriptors that apply equally well to cookies, biscuits, and pie.
What makes a cake a cake is the little granules of flavor created by the interaction of proteins, yeast, and sugars in the batter. And air. The aeration of the batter makes a big difference, which is why cake ingredients are often mixed and not folded.
Dense cake, such as pound cake, makes for a better foundation for honey, molasses, or treacle coatings. A fluffier sponge pairs well with a rich frosting. Both of which can also be found, albeit in miniature size, in the cupcakes. The ratio of frosting to crumb is important to deliver flavors that don't overwhelm.
Some Science
Gluten plays a part in the formation of crumb as well. This popular football of the nutrition world is the protein of wheat that gives baked goods their elasticity. Too little gluten and your cupcakes become sand. too much and you are eating a muffin.
To get enough air in a cake you need to hit it hard, especially the eggs which you need to beat vigorously. The eggs are not beat alone or in the presence of sugar, as you would with meringue, but along with the fat of either butter or shortening.
This creates a finer interlace of air, encased by a lipid layer of fat. Soap bubbles are an approximate comparison, with the outer shimmery layer keeping the air contained. Too little fat and the bubbles burst, leaving dense clusters more fitting of cookies than cake.
This layer of fat also keeps the stretchy bonds of gluten from binding up. It acts as a buffer so that the cake has to be springy around the holes and not contract into them.
Consider the grain of your sugar as well. Fine sugars will lead to a denser cake with less well-defined crumbs. Raw sugar caramelizes a bit while backing, leaving sharper edges on the crumbs.
If using artificial sweeteners, check out their temperature ranges to avoid issues with sinking that can leave yeast undernourished and fluffiness uneven.
One Size to Bring Them Together
Both cakes and cupcakes can be made in any size. To shape a magnificent decorative marvel, one more construct than food, often requires several sheet cakes combined.
Cupcakes, though variable in size, trend towards three primary sizes. Baking utensils such as cupcake trays and paper or foil wrappers control the size for most bakers.
The three most common sizes include the mini, the standard, and the jumbo. The jumbo breaks the mold of conventional cupcaking and, if we're being honest, exist because some people like jumbo muffins.
The generally smaller size of a cupcake offers better control for (slightly) nutritious dessert eating and presents an individual canvas for decorating. Cupcakes don't need to be thought of as strictly individual instruments, either. Mini cupcakes in particular can be put in batches to create mosaic images that give cakes shaped like things a run for their eye-popping splendor.
Batches of cupcakes also look elegant and inviting when displayed on three or five tiered towers such as the ones seen at https://thesmartbaker.com/.
For jumbo cupcakes, some cutting is probably best but for filled and marbled cake recipes, jumbo cupcakes really show off the goods.
A Song of Fire and Yeast
Temperature is an important lesson when learning how to bake a cake. The faster a cake cooks, the more time it has to rise. paradoxically, the lower the temperature, the less a cake will rise.
The difference between 325 and 375 degrees Fahrenheit (the usual baking temperatures) may seem catastrophic if you've done a lot of oven roasting. That's the difference between a tasty roast and some undercooked ick.
Cake is more forgiving in this temperature range, with a sweet, fully cooked, treasure coming out the other side.
The difference is how much of the cake rises above the surface. In sheet cake terms, this is how much dome you need to smooth out or shave before frosting.
For cupcakes, it is how much golden crispy top you get to work with above the foil.
Lower heat at a suitably longer bake time (20 minutes, instead of 15) yields a denser cake than the higher heat for less time.
Part of this decision goes back to your desired crumb size. High heat makes for airy cupcakes. Low heat requires more batter to fill the same size of wrapper.
For adult dessert needs, the airy cakes offer a lot of sweetness for a calorie-conscious serving. Dense cupcakes fall apart less, so if you have kids wandering around licking the frosting off before they even start peeling the wrapper aside, a dense cake saves a lot of vacuuming.
ROUS (Recipes of Unusual Sweetness)
Any recipe that creates a cake can be used to create a cupcake. One thing you'll pick up when learning how to bake cupcakes is that not all cake batters should be used to make cupcakes.
Meringue-based cake batters expand quickly and rely, in part, on their weight to fall and fold in to create delicate, tasty layers. While these can be used to make cupcakes, the science is tough and the translations often lost.
Filled recipes offer similar issues with the ratios to batter and filling causing some issues. Take any filled cake recipe and attempt it at a lower heat with more batter in the wrapper to get a better result.
Sponge cake results in cupcakes more akin to cornbread than cake. It's a terrific choice if you want a pared-down dessert served with a liquor-based syrup and a touch of flambe. For handing over to children they are a nightmare of flopped tops and scattered crumbs.
Pound cake recipes offer thick, heavy cupcakes that take fruit flavors well and offer an earthy alternative. Try these on a low-sugar diet loaded up with preserves. Technically still cupcakes, they only SEEM like muffins.
The best cake recipes are the same you would use to make a sheet cake. This medium sponge has a lot of range in crumb consistency, holds flavor across the size shifts, and takes little more than some temperature/time dialing to convert.
The Sometimes and Future King
Cakes, if you have a knack born of years of practice, offer a faster one and done approach to dessert. You bake the thing, you frost the thing, then you cut the thing. The cutting is often the most atrocious part, requiring plates and knives and assorted bickering over who gets what letter and the ever-coveted corner pieces.
Cupcakes take less time to bake, more time to decorate and make much less mess to distribute. The biggest bonus? Cupcakes are pretty much all corner pieces.
Traditional cakes take at least 35 minutes in the oven with multilayered monstrosities reaching at least two hours to bake, cool, shave, and stack.
Cupcakes take 20 minutes on the slow side and need only cool for half the time (smaller volume means faster heat distribution).
Some Color of Cauldron
At the end of the day, everyone wins in the fight between cupcake vs cake. The losers get cake, the winners get smaller, arguably better, cake. Cake that you get to eat and have in your preferred ratio.
Not all conflicts are as easy to resolve. For more advice and information on the flavors and tastes of your wold, keep coming back here.
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