The old-fashioned pound cake, or cup cake, or "one, two, three, four " cake is the mother of all the many cakes of to-day in which butter is used. While the old" diet bread" or sponge cake is the foundation from which the angel and sunshine cakes, the lady fingers, jelly rolls, and meringues have been derived.

A certain relative proportion is to be followed in butter cakes; there is less butter than sugar, and less sugar than flour. Less baking powder is required with a given measure of flour than would be necessary for a dough without eggs. Thus an even teaspoon of baking powder is ample for each cup of flour for a cake where several eggs are used. When there is an excess of baking powder, the cake is liable to be coarse grained and to dry quickly.

The doughnut mixture is not unlike a cottage pudding dough, with the addition of flour to make it stiff enough to roll easily. Or it is similar to the quick biscuit dough, with the addition of sugar, egg, and spice. Because doughnuts are cooked in fat, less shortening is required than for most stiff doughs.

Cooky doughs are more like pastry, with the addition of sugar, spice, and egg, and the same care should be given to keeping the dough cold in order to roll and cut it without adhering to the board.

Changes in the proportions of materials often lead to changes in the manner of mixing them. For example, where a small quantity of shortening is used in batters, it may be melted and beaten in, but where a large proportion is required, it should be rubbed till creamy and blended with the sugar as for cake, or mixed into the flour as in pastry-making. For stiff doughs which are to be rolled, it is essential that the fat should be cold, since even a small quantity, if warm, will tend to make the dough soft and sticky.

The shape in which cake is to be baked should decide the proportion of flour to be used. Layer cakes or small cakes require less flour than large loaves. This is probably because the small cake is stiffened quicker by the heat.

Variations in cake are easily obtained through changes in flavoring ingredients. To mix chocolate in the cake, melt it and mix with the sugar and butter.

Almond paste can be rubbed into the butter and sugar in making cookies; it is rather rich and heavy for a cake. Desiccated cocoanut, chopped nuts, raisins, currants, dates, citron, candied orange, and lemon peel, singly or in various combinations, serve to give many cakes from a single recipe.

In rubbing butter and sugar to a cream the warmth of the bowl, or the hand if that be used, or from the friction, causes the butter to soften and become almost a liquid or like thick cream; that is why we call it "creaming the butter." Some of the sugar also is dissolved and combines with the soft butter. When milk is added, especially if it be colder, as it usually -is, it immediately chills the butter and causes it to harden again in tiny lumps. It also unites with the sugar which has melted and dissolves any that may be still in a crystallized form, and separates it from the butter. The milk does not become sour as it does when curdled by an acid, but the hardened butter separates from the liquid and gives the curdled appearance. Probably the fat in the butter unites with the fat of the milk, but as fat does not unite readily with water, the whey or water of the milk separates from the other parts.

In beating the eggs we make bubbles of air similar to soap bubbles when air is blown into soapy water; the albumen of the egg forming the wall of the air cell. When the eggs are beaten into the butter the fat combines with the albumen and helps to entangle and hold the air, but when we stir a watery liquid, like milk, into the mixture, we break up some of these fine bubbles and this makes large cells, and the result is a coarse-grained cake, unless we beat in at the last enough more air to make another lot of bubbles.

This may be avoided by simply pouring the milk into the bowl and not stirring it until the flour is added; or, better still, by adding a few spoonfuls of flour first, then a little of the milk, and then a little flour, beating well after each time, and so on, alternately, until the full measure is used. Add the beaten whites last. All cakes made with butter require to be beaten long and vigorously after the flour is in that they may be smooth and fine grained