2009.02.01 in uncategorized
Mysterious Muffins
So today I was in commons eating breakfast and they had brown muffins. These brown muffins surprised me. I don't associate muffins with being brown, and more whiteish with speckles, like blueberry or chocolate chip. I didn't know what kind of muffin it was. So I was eating this brown muffin and I still didn't know what it was. I thought it might be chocolate. It might have tasted like chocolate but I wasn't really sure. So then I was wondering, is it a cupcake? Are muffins and cupcakes really the same thing? I have wondered this before but never found a good answer. Are cupcakes a subclass of muffin? Is there a fundamental difference between cupcakes and muffins I'm missing? How is muffin defined? The words aren't quite interchangable. It would be odd to have a corn cupcake and not a muffin. Could the set of associated flavors / varieties be the difference? Now with cupcakes, you have your chocolate and vanilla flavors and potentially others, but I don't see why muffins could not be those.
What other attributes could differentiate them? Size or shape? They basically have the same shape, with the narrower area with the little paper squiggly thing on the bottom with a wider part at the top, although there is a wide range on how large the top of the muffin/cupcake is. I do think the muffin/cupcakes that have large, impressive tops that expand far beyond the paper entrapped bottom that I have ever seen have been muffins, while cupcakes I have seen tend to remain almost confined to the bottom region, although this is also true of many muffins I have seen.
Now that I think of it, last week there were muffins that were chocolatey and had oreos or something on them. Although it might have been a cupcake. What's the difference between cupcakes and muffins? After I ate the mystery brown muffin-cupcake I thought it had a weird almost nutty aftertaste, although I'm not sure of the bearing on this food item's muffin-hood.
Obligatory cornify button
