You may mix into the dough two table-spoonfuls of carraway seeds.
MOLASSES BREAD CAKE.—On a bread-making day, when the wheat-bread has risen perfectly light and is cracked on the surface, take as much of the dough as will fill a quart bowl, and place it in a broad pan. Cut up a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, and set it over the fire to warm and soften, but do not let it melt to an oil. When quite soft, mix with it half a pint of West India molasses, a small table-spoonful of powdered cinnamon, and the finely-grated yellow rind of a large orange or lemon; adding also the juice. Have ready three eggs, well beaten, and add them gradually to the mixture. It must form a lump of soft dough; but not too thin to knead with your hands. Knead it well on the paste-board for a quarter of an hour. Butter some tin pans; put an equal portion of the dough into each; cover them; and set them in a warm but not a hot place for a quarter of an hour before baking. Then bake the cakes well. Instead of small pans you may bake the whole of the dough in one large one. This cake should be eaten the day it is baked; fresh but not warm. All sweet cakes in which yeast is an ingredient are best and most wholesome when fresh, as the next day they become hard, dry, and comparatively heavy.
BREAD MUFFINS.—Take some bread dough that has risen as light as possible, and knead into it some well-beaten egg in the proportion of two eggs to about a pound of dough. Then mix in a tea-spoonful of soda that has been dissolved in a very little lukewarm water. Let the dough stand in a warm place for a quarter of an hour. Then bake it in muffin-rings. You can thus, with very little trouble, have muffins for tea whenever you bake bread in the afternoon.
TO FRESHEN CAKES.—Cakes when stale may be much improved, if about an hour before they are wanted for tea, you enclose them in a circular wooden box with a tight-fitting lid, and place it on the marble hearth before a good coal fire; but not so close as to be in danger of scorching the box, which must be turned round, occasionally, so as to receive the heat equally on all sides. A tin or stone-ware box will not answer at all for this purpose, being too cold. If you burn wood-fires, set the box with the cake into a plate-warmer, or place it on a tall skillet, so as to be out of the way of coals or ashes falling on it, should the sticks break on the fire.