A magical dessert!

Have you ever seen those coloured muffins people cook and decorate with different forms and ingredients? I am sure you have and for those who haven´t, they are called fairy cakes and you just have to look to the right side of this blog to see a little bird with one of them.

To begin with, I am going to explain briefly what a fairy cake is in order to everyone can understand what I am talking about. A fairy cake is a small cake for one single person, baked in a small, thin paper or in an aluminium or silicone cup just as a muffin. They can be of different colours, flavours and shapes depending on the frostings, sprinkles and other decorations you want to put on them.

Now that everyone has got the idea and can have a mental image of it, let´s think about its name. Obviously, fairies don´t exist (sorry for those who think otherwise) and therefore, they could not make nor even invent this kind of cake, then why this name and not simply “small cake” or something similar? The reason is that the name “fairy cake” is a fanciful description of its size, which would be appropriate for a party of tiny fairies. As we all know, fairies are generally very small creatures, so this cake to them would have the same size as a regular one to us. Besides, according to A Dictionary of Fairies, the fairies “bake small, delicious cakes which they give to their benefactors”. So it´s like we were eating one cake baked by one of these little creatures.

An American variant of this dessert is the cupcake, a name more common in Spain than the previous one. The difference between the English fairy cakes and the American cupcakes is that the English ones are smaller and rarely topped with elaborated icing.

This name, as you can notice, is also a curious one and its origin has two different theories: The first one is that these cakes were originally baked in cups, as some cookbooks mention sometimes. These cups may have been earthenware tea cups or other small clay baking pans in order to put them on the oven and produce individual-size cakes. And the second one is that the ingredients used to make the cupcakes were measured out by the cup, that is, one cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, one cup of milk, and so on.

Nowadays, these cakes have become a trend in the culinary world and there are cookbooks, as the one of the TV presenter Martha Stewart, blogs and magazines specifically dedicated to them. There are cupcakes shops as well, like “Magnolia Bakery”, which has gained publicity thanks to its appearances on popular television shows like HBO´s “Sex and the City”.

In addition to all this and as a conclusion, they are ideal for children´s birthday parties. Just imagine a magically themed princess party with fairy cakes as the main dessert, it would look perfect!

Hope you enjoyed it!