Wheat to Cupcake
What’s Included
📜 History — where wheat and flour come from
🧮 Math — grams vs. cups
🧪 Science — how cupcakes rise + a balloon experiment [link]
🔗 Jump to Recipes
Fresh-Milled Vanilla Cupcakes → [link]
All-Purpose Flour Vanilla Cupcakes → [link]
Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe → [link]
A Short History, Hands-On Learning, and Fresh-Milled Cupcake Tips for Families
Before the oven is on…
before the mixing bowls come out…
before cupcakes become cupcakes…
there is wheat.
And that wheat has a story that stretches back thousands of years — a story kids can understand, touch, and take part in.
Where Flour Begins
Flour starts as wheat — the seeds of real plants growing in a field, swaying in the wind, turning golden when they are ready.
Each wheat plant makes seeds.
Those seeds are called wheat kernels, or wheat berries.
Inside every wheat berry are three important parts:
the outer layer, which protects the grain and adds fiber
a tiny baby plant (the germ), which contains natural oils and vitamins
the middle, which stores energy to help the plant grow
For most of human history, people understood this instinctively — because they handled wheat with their own hands.
How Flour Was Made for Thousands of Years
Long before grocery stores or bags of flour, families ground grain by hand.
Wheat was crushed between stones
Later, villages used quern stones, watermills, and windmills
Grain was ground just before baking, because fresh flour didn’t keep long
Nothing was removed.
The whole grain went into the flour.
Fresh flour wasn’t a choice — it was the only option.
🏭 When Flour Changed
Everything shifted in the late 1800s.
Industrial roller mills could:
grind grain faster
separate wheat into parts
create very white, fine flour
As railroads and shipping expanded, flour needed to travel farther, sit longer, and look the same every time. To make that possible, mills removed the outer layer and the baby plant.
The result was all-purpose flour — convenient and consistent, but no longer the whole grain.
Not All Wheat Is the Same
Wheat isn’t just “wheat.” There are different types, and each behaves differently in baking.
The 6 Main Types of Wheat
Hard Red Wheat
strong, high protein
great for bread
darker color, stronger flavor
Hard White Wheat
strong like hard red
lighter color, milder flavor
often used to make all-purpose flour
Soft Red Wheat
low protein
tender
good for cakes, cookies, and crackers
Soft White Wheat
low protein
very mild and light
great for cupcakes, muffins, and pastries
Durum Wheat
very hard
used for pasta and semolina
Ancient Wheats
includes spelt, einkorn, and emmer
older varieties with different traits and flavors
Varieties
Within these six types are thousands of varieties.
Think of it like apples:
apple = wheat
Granny Smith, Fuji, Gala = wheat varieties
Globally, there are 20,000+ known wheat varieties, but most people only ever bake with a few.
Why This Matters for Baking
Most all-purpose flour starts with hard wheat (hard white or hard red).
Hard wheat is:
strong
stretchy
perfect for bread
But for tender baked goods like cupcakes, muffins, and pancakes, soft wheat is a better choice.
What We Do Differently at Farm School
We grind (mill) our flour right before baking.
Nothing is removed.
Nothing is aged.
Nothing sits on a shelf.
That’s why fresh-milled flour:
smells different
feels different
behaves differently in recipes
And it’s why our cupcakes turn out soft, tender, and full of real wheat flavor.
👉 You can find our fresh milled cupcake recipe HERE.
If fresh milling isn’t something you’re ready for yet, that’s okay — these cupcakes still work beautifully with store-bought all-purpose flour.
👉 You can find our basic homemade cupcake recipe using all-purpose flour HERE.
⚖️ Why We Weigh Fresh-Milled Flour
When flour is milled at a large factory, it moves through belts and bins, gets packed into bags, shipped long distances, and sits on shelves. All of that movement compresses the flour.
Fresh-milled flour is light and fluffy by comparison.
That’s why we measure fresh-milled flour by weight, not cups. A cup of flour weighs about 120 grams, which makes it easy to substitute accurately.
This also makes a great math lesson for older kids:
“If one cup is 120 grams, how many grams would we need for a cup and a half?”
The Way We Choose Our Ingredients
At Farm School, we don’t just follow recipes — we talk about why ingredients are chosen and what each one contributes.
Fresh-Milled Flour
Whole grain flour contains fiber, healthy oils, vitamins, minerals, and plant compounds that haven’t had time to break down.
Butter, Milk & Yogurt
These provide fats and proteins that:
support brain development
help absorb fat-soluble vitamins
create tenderness and structure
Eggs
Eggs provide structure and strength — they hold everything together.
Sugar
Sugar adds sweetness, moisture, and softness — not just flavor.
Salt
Salt balances and sharpens flavor.
Baking Powder & Baking Soda
Baking powder helps cupcakes rise and become light and fluffy instead of dense and heavy.
It’s made of three parts:
baking soda — makes gas
an acid — wakes up the baking soda
starch — keeps them from reacting too early
When baking powder gets wet and warm, it makes carbon dioxide gas. Those bubbles get trapped in the batter and push it up as it bakes.
That’s how cupcakes rise.
👉 Try This: Baking Soda + Vinegar Balloon science experiment
Go one step further to reinforce the science…
How to Make Baking Powder at Home
Mix together:
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons cream of tartar (this is the acid)
1 teaspoon cornstarch (starch)
That’s it. This works just like store-bought baking powder.
The Bigger Lesson
Each ingredient has a job.
When kids learn that:
fat makes things tender
protein gives structure
flour choice affects texture
bubbles make things rise
they stop seeing baking as “just mixing” and start understanding how food works.
Thinking About Milling Your Own Flour?
Coffee grinder — great for small batches
NutriMill grain mill — what we use at Farm School; a bigger investment, but one I’ve loved and used constantly.
You could also use the traditional stone-ground method. This is how wheat was originally ground. Just expect a coarser flour texture, which is wonderful for reinforcing the historical aspect of the lesson.
👉 Try this: grind one small batch of wheat using the stone-ground method and another using a coffee grinder. Let the kids touch both flours, feel the texture, and compare them side by side. Then have them make a hypothesis about how each flour might change the bread’s texture, rise, and flavor before baking.
Start where you are. Use what you have.
🛒 Where to Buy Wheat Berries
👉Azure Standard Link —This is where I buy mine. It’s great for bulk buying and clearly labeled wheat types.
You can also buy on Amazon. I have never bought from there so I’m not much help on which one to buy.
Even without a mill, letting kids see and handle wheat berries builds a powerful connection to food.
More Than a Recipe
When kids bake this way, they’re doing more than following instructions.
They’re seeing where food comes from, learning that ingredients are chosen on purpose, and finishing a journey that began in a field.
From wheat… to flour… to cupcake… to their own hands.
And yes — these cupcakes contain sugar.
But they also contain fiber, fat, and protein, which help slow how sugar is absorbed and provide steady energy.
They contain the building blocks growing bodies need:
protein for repair
fats for brain development
whole-grain carbohydrates for fuel
These are cupcakes made with intention — not just sweetness.
They remind us that dessert can still be real food, learning can happen in the kitchen, and balance matters more than perfection.
If you choose to try it, we’d love to see the results and hear what your kids notice and discover along the way. Snap a photo or short video, share your observations, and tag us on Instagram or Facebook @k2acres so we can follow along, celebrate your experiments, and learn right alongside you.
