Breakfast and Tea Cakes

Take part of the dough left from bread making when ready to mould into loaves, work in lard and any other ingredients desired, such as butter, eggs, sugar, spice, etc., also using a little more flour.

Let rise once, then mix down and let rise again.

Turn out on the bread board, knead a few minutes, roll, and cut out with a biscuit cutter or mould by hand.

Place in a well-greased dripping-pan, and when light, bake in a quick oven from fifteen to twenty minutes.

Wet them over the top with warm water just before placing in the oven to make them a nice color.

Brush lightly with milk and sugar, or the well-beaten yolk of an egg sweetened with a little milk added, to glaze them.

Biscuits may be baked in eight minutes by making the oven as hot as can be without burning them and allowing it to cool off before they are taken out. This makes them very light, but one has to watch them to keep them from being scorched.

Bread or pastry mixed with water requires a hotter fire than if mixed with milk.

If you wish biscuit for tea at six, begin to mould two hours before, which will give ample time for rising and baking.

If you want American House rolls for breakfast at eight, you must be up at five to get them ready.

Many persons think it unnecessary to knead down either bread or biscuit as often as we have directed. But if attention is given to the dough at the right time, and it is not suffered to become too light, it will be much nicer, whiter and of a finer texture if these directions are followed.

Soda biscuit must be handled as little and made as rapidly as possible.

Mix soda and cream tartar or baking powder in the flour, so that the effervescence takes place in the mixture.

One teaspoon soda and two of cream tartar, or three teaspoons baking powder, to every three pints of flour, is about the right proportion.

Bake in a quick oven as soon as made.

Soda and raised biscuit, bread or cake when stale can be made almost as nice as when fresh by plunging for an instant into cold water, then placing in a pan in the oven ten or fifteen minutes. But thus treated they should be used immediately.

Waffle irons should be heated, then buttered or greased with lard, and one side filled with batter. Then closed and laid on the fire or placed on the stove, and after a few minutes turned on the other side.

They take about twice as long to bake as griddle cakes.

Muffins are baked in muffin rings.

In eating them, do not cut but break them open.