This is a way of preparing egg yolks and sugar (Portugal's favorite taste) for sweets. Egg threads look like mounds of yellow noodles and are served as a garnish to cakes and puddings. They are a little troublesome to make and professional cooks have a funnel with various narrow openings to make the egg yolks drop in fine threads over the boiling sugar. Read more . Failing a special funnel, one must of course use and ordinary one, but the operation becomes much more precarious, and success does not always ensue. Nevertheless, do not dismay, because any egg yolk dropped unevenly over the syrup will be still edible, though less pretty to look at :)