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Mocha Filling
Two cups confectioners' sugar, one-half cup butter (soft), two teaspoons vanilla, four tablespoons hot coffee, four tablespoons cocoa.
— Miss Helen L. Dunn
An uncooked butter icing with no method given — the ingredient list is the whole recipe. Order of operations is what makes it work.
- Method the original omitsCream the soft butter until light, then sift in the sugar and cocoa together and beat. Add the vanilla, then the hot coffee a tablespoon at a time, beating between additions.
- Hot coffee is the hingeThe coffee must be hot enough to bloom the cocoa and dissolve the sugar, but added slowly. Poured in all at once it can loosen the butter into a curdled slick that is troublesome to bring back.
- Confectioners' sugarTwo cups is about 8 oz / 225 g. Sift it — powdered sugar of this period was often lumpier than modern 10X, and this recipe has no cooking step to dissolve lumps.
- CocoaFour tablespoons means unsweetened cocoa powder, not drinking chocolate or a sweetened mix. Natural (non-alkalised) cocoa is sharper; Dutch-process is smoother and darker.
- ButterHalf a cup is one stick, 4 oz / 115 g. "Soft" means pliable at cool room temperature, not melted or greasy; melted butter will not hold air and the filling will set hard rather than creamy.
- Coffee strengthUse a strong brew or espresso; weak drip coffee disappears entirely behind the cocoa and vanilla.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 cups, enough to fill and thinly top a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. It thickens as it cools; beat again briefly before spreading.
- KeepingButter and sugar with no eggs, so it holds a day or two at cool room temperature. Refrigeration makes it stiff — let it come back before spreading.
"Mocha" in American cookbooks of this period rarely meant a chocolate-and-coffee blend as a flavour idea in itself; it meant coffee, after the port of Mokha in Yemen through which much of the early coffee trade passed, and by the late nineteenth century the word had drifted to mean coffee-flavoured confectionery generally. Cocoa added alongside it, as in Miss Dunn's version, deepens both colour and flavour. The recipe's form — a list of ingredients and a name, with the method left to the reader — is characteristic of contributed collections.