Cupcakes vs. Muffins

I'm one of those people who has a fantastic memory for unimportant, trivial data. Need the name of an actor from a bad action movie you saw two years ago? Got it. How does the chorus go for that random song from the early 90s? No problem.

So there's this one scene from Shrek where the Gingerbread Man is being questioned on what he knows,

and for some reason, this was all I could think about while making these...muffins? Cupcakes? Are they automatically cupcakes because they have frosting? Muffins, because of the gingerbread?

THE WORLD MAY NEVER KNOW.

The point is, these gingerbread muffins/cupcakes with the white chocolate cream cheese glaze/frosting turned out epically better than the horror of the citrus bars. (Yes, "horror" is a bit strong, but you didn't see what was left after straining the mixture through a fine mesh sieve. AND MAY YOU NEVER HAVE TO.)

I used a Trader Joe's gingerbread mix that had been lurking at the back of my shelf since December or so, and it was spectacular. I think making a loaf of gingerbread would have actually been too much of a flavor punch - too intimidating to consume. After a judicious batter tasting (there might have been a warning on the box to not eat raw batter. I don't know - I make it a point to disregard/deliberately not search for these types of cautions), I poured them out. The mix exactly filled out the 12 cups in my silicone muffin...contraption.  I hate this thing, by the way. I CAN NEVER GET IT CLEAN. It remains spitefully oily, no matter what I do.

I topped the muffins off with a white-chocolate cream cheese glaze/frosting from Vanilla Sugar Blog. It was pretty straightforward, but oddly the cream cheese so exactly countered the sweetness of the white chocolate that I ended up needing to add some vanilla to bring it home.

Honestly, the only way these could have been better were if the glaze had come out pure white instead of the erm, softly dingy eggshell.

PRETTY TASTY THOUGH!