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Mocha Filling for Cake
One cup confectioners' sugar, one heaping tablespoon cocoa, a small tablespoon butter, a little vanilla; mix sugar, cocoa and butter together, and when well creamed add one and one-half tablespoons of strong left-over coffee-less coffee, if this quantity makes the mixture too soft.
— Mrs. Celia S. Chadwick
A one-bowl buttercream in miniature — essentially a mocha glaze stiff enough to hold between layers. The whole thing depends on getting the liquid right, and the original text says so in a garbled way.
- The garbled line"One and one-half tablespoons of strong left-over coffee-less coffee, if this quantity makes the mixture too soft" most likely garbles "strong left-over coffee — less coffee, if this quantity makes the mixture too soft." Read that way, add the coffee a teaspoon at a time and stop when the filling holds a soft peak.
- Confectioners' sugarFinely powdered sugar; modern boxes are cut with a little starch, though period sugar was not necessarily. One cup is about 4 oz / 115 g. Sift it if it has been sitting in the cupboard; lumps will not cream out.
- CocoaA heaping tablespoon of period cocoa was most likely natural (non-alkalized) powder, more acidic and sharper-tasting than Dutch-process, though alkalized cocoa was also available. Either works here; Dutch-process gives a darker, mellower filling.
- "A small tablespoon butter"A scant tablespoon rather than a level one, so a little under 1/2 oz / 14 g. It must be genuinely soft, or the sugar and cocoa will never cream in smoothly.
- The coffee"Left-over coffee" is simply coffee left from the breakfast pot, cooled. Use it strong and cold; hot coffee will melt the butter and slacken the filling.
- ConsistencyAim for something that spreads like thick frosting and does not run at the edges of a layer. If it goes too loose, beat in another spoonful of sifted sugar rather than adding more butter.
- YieldAbout half a cup, enough for a thin layer between the rounds of a small 8-inch two-layer cake or to fill a small loaf. Double it if you want a generous layer or to frost the sides.
Mocha as a flavor name comes from the Yemeni port of Mokha, long the shipping point for Arabian coffee; by the late nineteenth century American cooks used "mocha" to mean coffee, and then specifically coffee combined with chocolate, in cakes, fillings and icings. Community cookbooks like this one are full of such fillings because they solved a domestic problem: an uncooked butter-and-sugar mixture needed no thermometer, no boiling syrup and no eggs, and it could be stirred up in five minutes from a cup of yesterday's coffee that would otherwise have been thrown out. The frugality is the point.