Difference Between Old-Fashioned & Bakery-Style Muffins

Two things:

1. Muffins use different methods of mixing - Muffin Method, Cake Method, and 3rd, cutting butter into the flour.

2. Size and taste, more add-ins and more toppings, more butter and sugar (cake-like method?)

"Beware the morning monster muffin"
excerpt from https://www.seattletimes.com/

"Once upon a morning snack, a muffin was little. Whether homemade, from Betty’s boxed mix or a bakery, you could nosh one without suffering hip augmentation. With less than 200 calories in a standard muffin (weighing about 2 ounces), it could slip into what you eat weekly without weighty repercussions. It seemed so harmless.

Today, things are a little different.

Harried, you skip breakfast, instead stopping at Starbucks for your venti vanilla nonfat latte and grabbing a blueberry muffin — hey, it’s trans-fat free! But at 5 ounces, each muffin packs 500 calories that you weren’t thinking about — perhaps a quarter of your day’s calorie allowance.

Or maybe to save money, you instead buy a dozen blueberry muffins from Costco and package them individually to eat midmorning at your desk. You might be saving some dough, but not calories. At nearly 6 ounces, they’re each a sobering 612 calories — equivalent to at least three “standard” muffins from the 1980s. In contrast, the maligned McDonald’s Egg McMuffin — also trans-fat free — has only half that, at 300 calories.

Muffins have morphed into sweet cupcakes the size of Beverly Hills implants — packing in two to four times the calories as before. At 500-plus calories (typical of a coffee-shop muffin), three a week could pad you with an extra 22-plus pounds in a year."

Wikipedia: Recipes for quickbread muffins are common in 19th-century American cookbooks. Recipes for yeast-based muffins, which were sometimes called "common muffins" or "wheat muffins" in 19th-century American cookbooks, can be found in much older cookbooks. In Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, she gave recipes for both types of muffins, both those that used yeast to raise the dough and those that used a quick bread method, using muffin rings to shape, what we would call, the English muffins. Farmer indicated that stove top "baking", as is done with yeast dough, was a useful method when baking in an oven was not practical. Over the years, the size and calorie content of muffins has changed: the 3-inch muffins grandmother made had only 120 to 160 calories. But today's giant bakery muffins contain from 340 to 630 calories each.

 

from https://findingmymom.wordpress.com/2017/05/18/old-fashioned-muffins-made-from-scratch/

"Muffins evolved over the last 20 or 30 years into miniature cakes. They are baked in muffin tins in muffin-shaped paper linings, but they are different. They aren’t like the muffins we ate as children back in the 1950s and 1960s. Those were homemade from scratch, not from a mix and certainly not from a bakery or coffee shop.

"Muffins often have fruit baked in them and are thus more of a breakfast food than cupcakes would be. They don’t have icing on top, so that distinguishes them from cupcakes too. The texture and sweetness of modern muffins seems more and more like cupcakes these days and the distinction has blurred.

"The muffin originally was much less sweet and much less enriched than a cupcake. Also, the batter of a muffin was stirred as little as possible so that there could still be lumbs in the batter so as to not develop gluten, whereas a cupcake would be made with cake flour and blended thoroughly. Muffins also didn't use the creaming method for preparing the fat - where a cupcake would always have butter and sugar creamed until fluffy.

"The shape was also different - a muffin would have a high, domed top where a cupcake would have a much more gently rounded top to accommodate frosting.

"Back when I grew up, we learned to make muffins in 4-H. They were bread-like, not sweet and cake-like. The old-style muffins benefited from liberal applications of butter then spread with jam or jelly. At times we put apple butter on them. These were the kind of muffins my mother ate as a child in the 1930s and baked for her young family in the 1940s."

The primary difference between old-fashioned and bakery-style muffins lies in the fat and leavening agents used, resulting in distinct textures and structures.

Old-fashioned muffins typically:

Bakery-style muffins are characterized by:

In summary:

Interestingly, I found both of these types of muffins in the 1950 edition of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. The recipes were simpler then, but the fact remains that both the Muffin Method for making muffins and the Cake Method for making muffins were used in that cookbook; it's not like that is what makes the difference between bakery muffins today and more traditional muffins.

Here are some recipes from the Betty Crocker Cookbook showing this. If you compare these recipes to those from today, more ingredients are used today and the recipes have become more elaborate. Taller, bigger, topped with streusel, perhaps sugar, or a nut topping.

Key differences include: