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Mocha Cake (No. 2)
1½ cups Five Roses flour Yolks of 3 eggs 1 teaspoon baking powder Grated rind of 1 lemon and 1 teaspoon of juice 1 tablespoon warm water.
Have whites well beaten and add alternately with the flour. Add the warm water last. 1 cup icing sugar ½ cup butter
This is one of the terser entries in the book: an ingredient list with the method folded into it, and a great deal assumed of the cook. Read it as a small sponge-type layer cake plus a butter icing before you begin.
- The list is really two listsEverything through the tablespoon of warm water is the cake; the cup of icing sugar and half cup of butter at the end are the mocha icing, beaten together and spread when the cake is cold. Printed as one run of text, they look like a single batter, which they are not.
- Eggs: separated, not yolks onlyThe ingredients call for three yolks, but the method says to fold in well-beaten whites. Separate three eggs, use the yolks in the batter and the whites beaten stiff, added alternately with the flour.
- The batter has no sugar as printedA sponge of this type would normally take sugar beaten with the yolks; a printer's omission is one explanation, but the original does not say, so treat the quantity as unknown rather than assume.
- Icing sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar. Sift it before beating into softened butter or the icing stays gritty.
- Where is the mochaNothing in the list is coffee. A mocha icing is butter and icing sugar beaten with a tablespoon or two of very strong cold coffee; without it this is simply lemon cake with buttercream.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake in a moderate oven, in modern terms around 350F. Two 8-inch layers take roughly 20 to 25 minutes; a single 8-inch square nearer 30.
- The flourFive Roses was hard Canadian spring wheat, stronger than most modern all-purpose flour. For a light sponge, measure by spooning and levelling and fold rather than stir once the whites are in.
- Warm water lastThe tablespoon of warm water goes in at the very end and should be folded through, not beaten. Its job is to loosen a batter stiffened by flour and whipped whites, and overworking it here undoes the aeration.
- YieldAbout eight to ten small slices from two thin 8-inch layers.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to sell its flour, and it was assembled largely from recipes submitted by Canadian housewives, which is why so many entries are compressed to the point of shorthand: the contributor knew how she made it, and the editors printed what she sent. Mocha itself takes its name from the Yemeni Red Sea port through which coffee was shipped to Europe, and by the late nineteenth century a mocha icing meant a butter icing flavoured with strong coffee, sometimes with chocolate alongside it. Its appearance in a domestic Canadian book of this period is worth noting in itself.