Cupcakes seem to be all the rage these days and here is a 1960s version.
This recipe is a piece of evidence as to the presence of processed convenience food mixes even in the 1960s — see the first ingredient, ‘1 pkg. white cake mix’. I’d make a strong guess that this recipe is also of American origin, like many of the baking recipes in my grandmother’s notebook, and the degree to which such products were commonplace in the U.S. is no indication of how widely available/used they were in Singapore at the same time.
Convenience foods were probably seen as an expression of a technologically-advanced modern society which made life easier for the housewife-cook, and my grandmother probably would have wanted to use them for that reason.
The result of that development is that today, convenience foods have become deeply embedded in the everyday life of most people. However, we are now well into a backlash against overly-processed foods filled with chemical additives and preservatives which can’t be good for one’s health in the long run.
Nostalgic Recipes from Nice 