Home › Menu XIX › Mocha Cream Sandwiches
Mocha Cream Sandwiches
With a fork whip half a cup of sweet butter until it is smooth and light. To a quarter of a cup of strong coffee add half a cupful of confectioners' sugar and a tablespoonful of cornstarch. Stir the two mixtures together. Spread thickly between lady fingers.
A no-bake icebox dessert that lives or dies on emulsion: a quarter cup of liquid coffee is a great deal to ask half a cup of butter to absorb. Work cold and slowly and it holds; rush it and it curdles.
- Add the coffee graduallyThe hinge of the recipe. Beat the coffee-sugar mixture into the butter a spoonful at a time, letting each addition disappear before the next. Dumping the two together, as the wording invites, usually gives a broken, weeping cream.
- Sweet butterPeriod term for unsalted butter. Use it at cool room temperature, around 65F — soft enough to whip with a fork, not greasy. A hand mixer does in one minute what the fork does in five.
- The coffee should be coldThe recipe says only "strong coffee"; brew it well above ordinary strength and cool it completely. Warm coffee will melt the butter and the cream will never come back. A tablespoon of instant espresso powder dissolved in a quarter cup of cold water is a reliable stand-in.
- The cornstarchIt is doing two jobs: absorbing moisture and stiffening the filling for slicing. It stays raw, which reads faintly chalky to modern palates. Either accept it, or leave it out and compensate with another two to three tablespoons of confectioners' sugar.
- Confectioners' sugarModern confectioners' sugar usually carries a small percentage of cornstarch as an anti-caking agent, which is why the extra spoonful is a small addition rather than a strange one. Sift it if lumpy; there is no heat here to dissolve lumps later.
- Lady fingersSavoiardi, the dry Italian kind, are firmer and hold their shape better than the soft supermarket sponge fingers. Either works, but soft ones will go damp within a few hours.
- Chill before servingSandwich the fingers, then refrigerate at least an hour so the butter sets and the cream can be cut cleanly. Bring back to cool room temperature for eating, or the filling tastes of nothing but cold fat.
- YieldThe finished cream comes to roughly a cup and a quarter, enough to fill a dozen or more sandwiches spread thickly. Best eaten within a day or two, covered, in the refrigerator.
"Mocha" travelled a long way to reach this page. The name belongs to al-Mokha, the Yemeni port that dominated the European coffee trade from the seventeenth century, and by the nineteenth century it had detached from any particular bean and simply meant coffee-flavoured — mocha cake, mocha icing, mocha cream, all of them brown with coffee and nothing else. The coffee-and-chocolate sense that dominates today came later, from the pairing of the two flavours in confectionery. A filling whipped with a fork and spread on bought sponge fingers asks nothing of the oven, which is much of its appeal in hot weather.