People tell me all the time that they only bake pareve. Most of the time, it’s because they only bake for Shabbos, and so by default any baked goods will have to be pareve.

I get it, I really do. But it always seems like a shame.

Butter really is better than oil or margarine. Milk really is better than soy milk. Yes, you can substitute successfully. But the real thing is…the real thing!

But now all you pareve people have no excuse! Friday begins nine entire days of meatless meals (with the exception of Shabbos), and I fully expect you to take advantage.

These cup muff-cakes are a good place to start.

As you can tell by the made-up word in the title of this post, I’m having a hard time calling them cupcakes. To me, a cupcake is a sweeter, softer version of a muffin, always with a frosting hat. Like this.

But that’s not the technical definition. Carine Goren helped with me that.

Apparently, the difference between true cupcakes and true muffins lies in how the ingredients are combined.

For a muffin, you either mix everything together in one shot or mix the dry and wet ingredients separately, then combine everything. A cupcake is more involved: You cream the butter and sugar, then beat in the other wet ingredients, and finally mix in the dry ones. The result is that texture I was talking about that makes the cupcake lighter than the muffin. More…cake-like. Obviously.

Anyway, the point is that although I should really call these cupcakes to be accurate, I still think they’re more like muffins. Especially because I didn’t feel the need to add any frosting.

All this means that you can have them for breakfast instead of dessert. See? It totally works.

Welcome to the world of muff-cakes.

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