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Mocha Cake (No. 1)
2 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder.
Spread in square pan, and cut in squares. Cover with almond icing and roll in nuts. ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar
This entry has come down to us scrambled and incomplete — the ingredient list has been broken apart and dropped into the middle of the method, and several components are missing outright. It is usable as a guide only if you already know how a creamed butter cake goes together.
- What is missingAs printed there are four ingredients: flour, baking powder, butter and sugar. There is no egg, no milk or other liquid, and no flavouring, and 2 cups of flour to half a cup of butter and one of sugar will not come together into a batter without them. Treat the numbers as a partial list rather than a complete formula.
- The order it was meant to runA cake of this type is creamed butter and sugar first, eggs next, then the flour sifted with the baking powder alternating with liquid. The two sentences about spreading in the pan and icing belong at the end, not where the typesetter left them.
- OvenNo temperature is given, as was usual in books of this period. A shallow butter cake of this kind would want a moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 25 to 30 minutes in a square pan.
- "Square pan"No size is stated; an 8-inch square is a reasonable modern default. In a pan of about that size the layer is thin enough to cut into small squares without crumbling, which is the point of the format.
- Almond icingThis may mean a butter icing flavoured with almond rather than marzipan, though the text does not say which. Either way it wants to be soft enough to coat the cut sides of each square so the chopped nuts will stick, and firm enough to set afterwards.
- Rolling in nutsCut the cake cold, ice the squares on all faces, then roll each one in finely chopped nuts spread on a sheet of paper. Warm cake will tear and the icing will slide.
- Where the mocha wentNothing in the surviving text contains coffee, which is what "mocha" denotes in cake naming of this era. The coffee almost certainly belonged to the icing or to a missing line of the ingredient list.
- YieldIf an 8-inch square pan is assumed, cutting into 1½-inch squares gives roughly 25 pieces — small, tea-tray scale rather than a dessert plate.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and was compiled largely from receipts contributed by its customers; the ingredient list spilling into the method here is a printing error of the kind such compilations can carry. "Mocha" in North American baking of the period generally meant coffee, sometimes coffee with chocolate, and mocha cakes were often small iced squares or rounds finished with chopped nuts and served at afternoon tea — the fussy, hand-finished end of home baking, and a natural showcase for a milled-flour promotion. That a second recipe appears under the same name (this is No. 1) may mean more than one version was submitted and both were printed.