To ascertain when the cake is done, run a broom straw into the middle of it; if it comes out clean and smooth, the cake will do to take out.

Where the recipe calls for baking powder, and you have none, you can use cream of tartar and soda in proportion to one level teaspoonful of soda, two heaping teaspoonfuls of cream of tartar.

When sour milk is called for in the recipe, use only soda.  Cakes made with molasses burn much more easily than those made with sugar.  Never stir cake after the butter and sugar is creamed, but beat it down from the bottom, up and over; this laps air into the cake batter, and produces little air cells, which cause the dough to puff and swell when it comes in contact with the heat while cooking.

When making most cakes, especially sponge cake, the flour should be added by degrees, stirred very slowly and lightly, for if stirred hard and fast it will make it porous and tough.

Cakes should be kept in tight tin cake-cans, or earthen jars, in a cool, dry place.

Cookies, jumbles, ginger-snaps, etc., require a quick oven; if they become moist or soft by keeping, put again into the oven a few minutes.

To remove a cake from a tin after it is baked, so that it will not crack, break or fall, first butter the tin well all around the sides and bottom; then cut a piece of letter paper to exactly fit the tin, butter that on both sides, placing it smoothly on the bottom and sides of the tin.  When the cake is baked, let it remain in the tin until it is cold; then set it in the oven a minute, or just long enough to warm the tin through.  Remove it from the oven; turn it upside down on your hand, tap the edge of the tin on the table and it will slip out with ease, leaving it whole.

If a cake-pan is too shallow for holding the quantity of cake to be baked, for fear of its being so light as to rise above the pan, that can be remedied by thoroughly greasing a piece of thick glazed letter paper with soft butter.  Place or fit it around the sides of the buttered tin, allowing it to reach an inch or more above the top.  If the oven heat is moderate the butter will preserve the paper from burning.

FROSTING OR ICING.

In the first place, the eggs should be cold, and the platter on which they are to be beaten also cold.  Allow, for the white of one egg, one small teacupful of powdered sugar.  Break the eggs and throw a small handful of the sugar on them as soon as you begin beating; keep adding it at intervals until it is all used up.  The eggs must not be beaten until the sugar has been added in this way, which gives a smooth, tender frosting, and one that will dry much sooner than the old way.

Spread with a broad knife evenly over the cake, and if it seems too thin, beat in a little more sugar.  Cover the cake with two coats, the second after the first has become dry, or nearly so.  If the icing gets too dry or stiff before the last coat is needed, it can be thinned sufficiently with a little water, enough to make it work smoothly.