Although you might suppose that cupcakes take their name from being little cups of cake, this is likely not the case. When cupcakes were given their name in the early nineteenth century, they were not referred to in the plural as cupcakes, but rather in the singular as cup cake; in other words, you made a batch of cup cake not a dozen cupcakes. The cup in cupcakes probably originated from all the ingredients for the dainty being measured in cups: one recipe from the turn of the nineteenth century called for three cups of flour, one cup of sugar, one cup of milk, and half a cup of butter (the poundcake likewise acquired its name in the mid eighteenth century because its recipe called for a pound of each ingredient). By the second decade of the twentieth century, however, people started to assume that the cup in the cup cake referred to the little moulds the batter was poured into, and thus the name changed to cupcakes.