Do you take sugar?

"White death!" my father used to exclaim as he sprinkled granulated white sugar on his cereal. As a surgeon he saw the impact of excess sugar on the human body - and had long since cut down other areas of sugar intake. This came to mind when, as part of our research on postal delivery, we ordered cupcakes by post the other day. The supplier's web site was appetising and easy to use, but we are not naming them as our disappointment is clear:

Looks: 2/5 Classic cupcake - cheap and cheerful (except at £20 for 6, not cheap).
Topping: 1/5 Pure sugar with artificial colouring.
Texture: 4/5 Sponge was light and moist, as promised.
Taste: 1/5 . Not the "zesty lemon" also promised. Artificial flavour and everything subsumed by the icing sugar wadge.
Aftertaste: 0/5 Sugar does create a desire for more. Fight your sugar-craving brain!

In short, we would only recommend them to Norwich City football fans for whom the yellow and green colours, that startled us as we opened the box, might generate more positive emotions.

Are muffins just naked cupcakes then, without sugary frosting? One of the bake debates, that... start asking what the difference is between cupcakes and muffins and you unearth a war of deeply divided advocates almost religious in their zeal. We started Magog Muffins with the ambition to create healthy, guilt-free treats and have found that you can make delicious muffins with very little sugar but with sweetness lurking in bursts of fruit or chocolate (and 85% dark chocolate will not translate into muffin tops). Sometimes we swish a sweeter shine across a freshly baked variety (e.g. lemon tea muffins) but the only one we were tempted to frost was cappuccino - possibly allowing a cupcake in disguise into our fold.

So, we stand behind the magical muffin. An independent being, secure in its body, without need for a smothering of sugary make-up to face the world. "Naked cupcakes" rule, O.K.?












P.S. And, before you ask, yes, we did eat all of the cupcakes that we rip into above! Testing the limits of that sugar craving, of course - and we are anyway quite shameless. If frosting is your thing, and if you really like sugary cupcakes, fine. Thank you again to all the cupcake eaters who contributed to the Haiti appeal below...