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Mocha Cake
Two eggs beaten light, one cup of sugar beaten gradually, one and one-half cups of flour, with two teaspoons of baking powder sifted with flour; add last one cup of boiling water in which is melted one teaspoon of butter, a little salt and flavor with vanilla. Filling-One teaspoon of butter creamed with one heaping cup of confectioner's sugar, two teaspoons of strong coffee, two teaspoons of cocoa; flavor with vanilla; whip with fork.
A hot-water sponge — the boiling water is what makes it tender, and it is added last on purpose. The original gives no pan, no temperature and no time, which was normal for a community cookbook where everyone already knew.
- The hinge: add the water last, and hotThe boiling water with butter melted in it goes in after the flour, and the batter goes straight into the oven. Waiting lets the baking powder spend itself before the cake sets, and the crumb turns coarse.
- Expect a thin batterOne cup of liquid to one and a half cups of flour gives something closer to a pourable batter than a stiff cake mix. That is correct here; do not compensate with extra flour.
- Oven and timeThe original specifies none. A modern working guess: 350F, about 18-22 minutes for two 8-inch layers or 30-35 for a single 8-inch square. Judge by the top springing back and the edges just pulling from the pan.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to a cup and a half of flour is a generous ratio by modern standards, though not unusual in older receipts. Sift it with the flour as directed rather than dumping it in.
- "Two teaspoons of strong coffee"This means strong brewed coffee, cooled, not grounds and not instant powder. Espresso works and gives a deeper flavour; a teaspoon of instant granules dissolved in two teaspoons of hot water is the closest substitute.
- CocoaUnsweetened cocoa powder, not drinking chocolate. Natural cocoa is the likelier intention; Dutch-process gives a darker, milder filling if you prefer it.
- The filling will be stiffOne teaspoon of butter and a heaping cup of confectioner's sugar with only two teaspoons of liquid coffee, plus two teaspoons of dry cocoa, barely comes together. Add cream or coffee a few drops at a time until it spreads; the 'whip with fork' instruction assumes you are working it soft by hand.
- YieldThe original gives no pan or serving count. The batter volume is modest, and the filling quantity is small for the amount of cake.
"Mocha" here means coffee, after Mokha, the Yemeni Red Sea port that shipped Arabian coffee to Europe for centuries; in American kitchens the word came to be used for coffee-flavoured confections and, as here, for coffee combined with chocolate. Mocha frosting recurs in community cookbooks partly because it needed nothing more than leftover coffee, cocoa and confectioner's sugar -- no cooked custard, no thermometer, no chocolate to melt. The cake beneath it is a hot-water sponge, a thrifty type that uses boiling water in place of milk and gets its lift from eggs and baking powder rather than creamed butter; a single teaspoon of butter in the whole cake tells you what it was for. The brevity of the instructions is typical of receipts compiled from members' own cards, where the contributor assumed her neighbours knew their own stoves.