Here's a thought about muffins VS cupcakes. I have created lots of muffin & cupcake recipes. What is the difference? I say a muffin is a quick bread a cupcake is a cake. A muffin should not be mixed with an electric mixer since it is a quickbread. The fat is liquid and is easy to mix into the batter and should not be creamed with a mixer. Following this philosophy, I changed all the names of my recipes accordingly! This recipe, in my opinion, should be a cupcake. What do you think PJ? Lorraine, there's a fine line - just as there is between scones and biscuits. To my mind, either may be made with either method (creaming or stirring), with more muffins being made by stirring, more cakes by creaming. The difference is more in the amount of sugar. I believe a muffin shouldn't be quite as sweet as a cupcake. That said, you can get into that gray area - how sweet is too sweet for a muffin? - and veer into cake-dom. For instance, there's a recipe on our site called Chocolate Breakfast Muffins that really is just about the best chocolate cupcake you'll ever make, and I know lots of people who use it as their default chocolate cupcake recipe. It's a stir-together recipe, which makes it lean towards being a muffin. But it's nearly as sweet as cake. Bottom line, Lorraine, I don't believe very much in "should" and "shouldn't" - other than the real no-no's like combining yeast with boiling water, stuff like that. Baking is both art and science, with a dollop of imagination thrown in, and when you get right down to it, very personal. Do what pleases you and your audience; call it what you will. And then, we can have online discussions like this one! Thanks for opening up a fun subject -PJH

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