Muffins are worth baking on an ordinary morning, and National Muffin Day is the nudge to do it. Stir the batter until it is only just mixed, and pass most of the tray to somebody who was not expecting it.
No founder, proclamation or establishment record for the February 20 date could be located in the Federal Register or in HathiTrust's indexed full text. The volunteer movement most often credited with the day describes finding a food day already on February 20, one it says was originally intended to celebrate the consumer, and flipping it around toward giving.
Jacob Kaufman and Julia Levy are the names attached to National Muffin Day, and by their own account they did not invent it. Their site describes finding a food day that already fell on February 20 and flipping it around to focus on giving back. What they built on top of it asks you to bake a dozen muffins and hand them to somebody who is hungry.
That leaves February 20 carrying two things at once. The food calendar has never moved the date. The version Kaufman and Levy run has, onto the Sunday after, which put their eleventh annual bake on 23 February in 2025.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Muffin Day ran on February 20. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy went on sale in London in 1747, printed for the author and sold out of a china shop. It carries a recipe for muffins and oat-cakes, and almost nothing in it looks like a bakery muffin.
The dough is raised with a pint and a half of good ale-yeast to a bushel of flour. It is pulled into pieces the size of a large walnut, covered with flannel, and cooked on an iron plate over a coal fire.
Glasse is precise about the eating. Toast the muffin on a fork until crisp on both sides, then pull it open with your hand. It comes apart like a honey-comb.
A knife is forbidden until the butter is in. Cut one open before that, she warns, and the muffins will be as heavy as lead.
On 5 April 1859 the United States granted Nathaniel Waterman of Boston Letters Patent No. 23,517. What it covers is eleven cups, each with a flat circular bottom, cast in one solid piece of iron.
The gaps between the cups were deliberate, left so heat could pass upward and reach every cup alike. The patent calls the thing an egg pan. The word muffin is nowhere in it.
The older muffin made the crossing intact. The American Society of Baking records that Samuel Bath Thomas left England in 1874 with a recipe for a muffin baked on hot griddles, and had his own Manhattan bakery by 1880. What he sold was coarse-grained and yeast-raised, and meant to be split rather than sliced.
Nothing carrying the phrase National Muffin Day turns up in the Federal Register or in HathiTrust's indexed full text. What is documented is what happened next.
Jacob Kaufman took a first batch of apple cinnamon muffins out of his oven, ate one, and asked what to do with the other 11. He gave them away the next morning on Market Street in San Francisco.
Julia Levy was running a blog about ordinary philanthropists when she heard about him. She called him back and proposed one day when friends, family and strangers would bake together.
TIMELINE
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Bake a dozen, give them away, and money follows behind.
The day turns a batch of home baking into a donation. For every person who bakes and gives, the organisers send money to a named cause, which was Project Homeless Connect in San Francisco when CNN covered the day in 2018.
Their own page states that a muffin will not solve homelessness. It argues instead that baking for a stranger makes people notice the need in their own community and stop to treat someone with kindness.
American English stretched the word to cover a cup-shaped bun or cake, while the older sense survives under the name English muffin. A day named for the muffin therefore covers two foods that are made in completely different ways.
BY THE NUMBERS
Other national food days are about the consumer. This isn't about what a person could have, but what a person can give.
GET INVOLVED
EDITOR'S PICK
HAND
TURN
GIVE
READ
Test your knowledge
No. It is an unofficial observance with no federal designation found in the Federal Register, so February 20 is an ordinary working day.
COLOPHON
Get your toasters ready - it's National English Muffin Day! Enjoy this versatile breakfast staple with a variety of toppings and flavors.
Get ready to indulge in some deliciousness! Celebrate National Blueberry Muffin Day with a warm, freshly-baked muffin and a cup of coffee.
Start your day off right with National Oatmeal Muffin Day! Delicious recipes and ideas to make the perfect muffins for everyone in your family.
