Whatever Happened to the Fairy Cake?

Spending the day helping with A level History revision has started my brain firing in all sorts of weird ways. From the mind mapped notes, I tested, questioned and was taught all about the History of Conservatives and Liberals between 1865 -1915. There were questions that I wanted answered that weren't in the time period and I got overly excited about the Allotment and Small Holdings Act 1892.

The problem with being forced to think is that it triggers more thinking.  Sometimes it would be nice to have nothing in my brain.  It would probably be nice for anyone who reads this blog too.

Today I have been wondering what happened to the fairy cake.  When I was a child, there was no such thing as a cupcake. Now, you rarely hear of a fairy cake or a butterfly cake.  Cupcake will always be an American term to me and I will stubbornly refuse to use it.  I assumed it's name came from the fact that the recipe takes equal parts of each ingredient and measures them in a cup but in American Cookery (1796)  by Amelia Simmons she mentions that cakes were baked in small pots including teacups. 

 The term cupcake appears in a book called Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats” in 1828 by Eliza Leslie.  There is no reference to the history of the term 'fairy cake' on the internet so I will make it up.

They are obviously cakes for fairies, who are small and need to eat small cakes.  

When we were small my mum used to make fairy tea parties for us.  We would use the china tea set from the dolls house.

The fact that the dolls house had a better tea set than we did, was purely due to the fact that these were pre-plastic days and our crockery came from the Co-op, exchanged for 125 Green Shield Stamps per piece.

We would have sandwiches made from the small Hovis loaves, grapes (pretending to be apples) and iced gems (pretending to be fairy cakes - because fairy cakes weren't small enough for real fairies.)

Taking this trip down memory lane has allowed my brain time to sort the cake name problem out once and for all.  From now on, I would like everyone to use the correct term for the correct cake.

Fairy Cake:  Small cake, baked with a sponge recipe with a small amount of glace icing on top, maybe some sprinkles or half a glace cherry.

Butterfly Cake: Small cake, baked with a sponge recipe with a small circle cut in the top.  The hole is filled with a small amount of lumpy buttercream and the circle is cut in half and the halves are shoved in the buttercream to make wings.

Muffins - This is an Amercian version of what we used to call a bun.  A small  un-iced sponge mix cake, flavoured with fruit or raisins.  The Americans being of considerably larger appetites made them much bigger and often added chocolate.  

Cupcake - Another American idea.  Just like a butterfly or fairy cake but bigger, with piles and piles of over-whipped buttercream on top.

The Americans really do have a cheek, constantly accusing the British of a sweet tooth.  They are worse, they must have just had better dentistry.