The first traces of cupcakes can be identified as early as the 18th century. In 1796, "on the American Cookery", Amelia Simmons began to write a few lines concerning small cakes to be cooked in certain containers, almost single portion. As for the specific term, or cupcake, it will be necessary to wait until 1828, when Eliza Leslie wrote the cookbook entitled "Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeat".
In the nineteenth century, for cupcake (or cup cake) two different preparations were still intended: one referred to desserts strongly resembling the current American muffins, to be cooked in small cups or ceramic molds (like tea cup); on the other hand, they were called "English Fairy Cakes", or traditional British sweets which, in addition to being smaller than the current cupcakes, were much less elaborate and almost never covered with other ingredients. The other type referred to recipes that used a system of measuring ingredients by volume (cups) rather than by weight; these too should have been cooked in the cups, however the larger molds and cake tins took over. In the following years, the recipes of this kind of cupcake became well 1234, all with a base of 4 ingredients: 1 cup of butter, 2 cups of sugar, 3 cups of flour and 4 eggs.
Being less expensive and relatively simple, these recipes began to distinguish an entire chain of low-cost desserts, while those that exploited the classic method of measuring "by weight" of the ingredients, also considered more expensive, acquired the name of "pound cake" .
