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Chocolate Glaze or Boiled Icing

1 pound of granulated sugar. 1/2 teacupful of water. 3 ounces of grated chocolate.--the common sort. 4 whole eggs. Vanilla flavoring extract. Boil the sugar and water together in a deep saucepan for five minutes, add the chocolate.

When a drop in cold water sets hard almost as candy stir in the eggs rapidly, beating all the while. Let cook about five minutes more with constant stirring. Flavor with vanilla. Beat more or less while it is cooling. Spread or pour it over sheets of cake.

The confectioners, too, like us to make these glaze cakes for their windows and show cases; they take pleasure when the cake is as white as the icing, and red jelly between the layers, in putting them in the front rank. Having 3 or 4 different kinds of glaze and sheets of the whitest cakes only about a third of an inch thick to cover with them you can cut them when set in squares or diamonds and triangles, red, white, yellow and chocolate, and they make a very pretty stack. Besides, small cakes, such as sponge drops, can be dipped in the icings while hot and another assortment made, just the thing for ornamental baskets and pyramids.

Chocolate Glaze without Eggs. 1 pound of sugar. 1/2 teacupful of water. 4 ounces of common chocolate, grated.

Boil all together almost to candy point, flavor with vanilla when partly cooled, beat a short time, spread over the cake.

Colored syrup of fruit juice and sugar boiled down thick enough to bubble and rise in the saucepan can be used instead of icings to cover cake with a glassy surface.

Items about Puff Paste.

When puff-paste has been rolled out and folded up again 4 times it lies just like 2 quires of tissue paper piled alternately a yellow sheet with a white sheet--a sheet of butter and a sheet of paste, all of the same evenness and regularity from bottom to top. It is hard to get butter and dough to lie so equally, but that is what has to be tried for, and we have to show how to make them come so. If baked then the sheets of paste or dough would be as sharp as knife blades, and might cut the mouth of the rash person who should try to eat them, the butter having all run out into the baking pan. One more rolling and folding makes the layers two-thirds thinner, and eatable, and another rolling after that makes the layers thin enough to be blown away with the breath. The reason of these unfinished sheets of paste being so sharp edged and continuous is, there is no shortening rubbed into the flour when fine puff-paste is wanted--the layers of dough are nothing but flour and water. Rubbing part or all of the butter or lard into the flour dry makes short-paste, but not the marvellous, flaky, high-flying puff-paste. Those who get their first instructions in home places never want to believe that. Some people say it is a matter of light touch, a peculiar temperament, a something inherited that makes certain individuals always and easily successes at making puff-paste and others always failures. They say women make better paste than men. There is no grounds for such a distinction. The probability is, it is a matter of sense and study, of head work more than hand work. A giddy person does not make fine paste, but is is not their hand that's giddy, it's their head. It is cause and effect again, and some cannot see their relation. Some people cannot place rolls in straight rows in the pan, nor lay strips on pies diamond-wise.

It makes all the difference when a fresh cub comes in the kitchen to be pastry cook's boy, if he has been one of those young ones that stand with their chin on the kitchen table seeing their mother make pies.

The others are amusing green and awkward. They will pour a pint of water into a big pan of flour and then go feeling around for the lumps it makes, and pick them out one by one. They could not work the lump of dough they get that way without a sledge hammer, and pie dough has to be about as soft as mush. The way is to pour the water in a hole made in the middle of the flour, and gently stir it round with two fingers till it has gathered in flour enough so it can be lifted out of the pan on to the table, there to be worked smooth and fit to roll out.

The best puff-paste is that made in 10, 15 or 20 minutes, according to the quantity, when one has no time to spare for packing it between pans of pounded ice, or for other foolishness, when the butter has been worked smooth and pliable beforehand, and lies ready in a pan of ice-water--when the ice-water stands ready to mix with, the flour is cold and the oven is hot and waiting--then you turn out paste that puffs and rises high and dry and wholesome. The reason is the ingredients don't have time to get warm and soggy, and there is an immense amount of labor and trouble saved over the ice packing way. Still, of course, the same method is not practicable in every place.

When the plain, soft flour and water dough has been rolled out as if for cutting biscuits out of, but instead is covered all over with the required amount of butter in lumps, and then the dough is folded over it, the essential thing and the only difficult one is to get the dough and butter to roll out again and again at even pace. Soft butter will give way under the rolling-pin and leave its place, burst through, or out at the ends. It is of no use trying with really soft butter, but when it is of medium firmness the dough may be mixed very soft to match it, and good paste may be made. With the flour and water extremely cold, the butter often hardens in the paste instead of softening--that is success, whether done in one or two hours in an ice-chest or in ten minutes on a cold table. There is another difficulty in the way of even distribution--the more the dough is worked and rolled the tougher it becomes and springs back, while the butter does not. To overcome that, the paste is allowed to rest awhile after about three rollings, but it is better in warm weather to get along without such an interval, by not kneading the dough at all, and having it soft enough at the start. The experienced workman goes through a certain routine every day that meets all exigencies, and his work is always alike, while others talk about the luck and having a light hand for fine paste.

They make a great fuss--the people who make verses do--about the beauties of milking the cows; as if there were no flies and cows didn't kick! It is much more charming to be working the butter. We have seen them at summer resort houses. They go where the spring water runs cold, and work the lump of butter in a trough till it is just perfection to make puff paste with--though no dairy maid ever will let her fresh lump of butter go for such a purpose. We have to work the butter as well as the time allowable in the crowded forenoon permits by pounding it in a wooden bowl with a potato masher Cold butter that is not so broken and made pliable is as bad as warm, for it will not be pressed out by rolling, but cuts its way through in lumps every-where. We have another newer and entirely different way of making fine leaf paste, but like this common way the best for meeting all the varied requirements of hotel work, and this is the formula.