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Mocha Frosting (No. 1)
1 cup confectioner's sugar ¼ cup butter 2 tablespoons very strong coffee (hot) 1 teaspoon cocoa 1 teaspoon vanilla Cream sugar and butter. Add other ingredients, mix together for 5 minutes and spread.
A small-batch coffee buttercream that comes together in one bowl. It is thick by design, meant to be spread while still slightly warm.
- YieldAbout three-quarters of a cup — enough to top a single 8-inch layer or eight or nine cupcakes. Double it for a filled two-layer cake.
- Confectioner's sugarSame product as today's icing or powdered sugar, though older grades were coarser. Sift it before creaming; modern cornstarch-blended sugar still lumps and lumps will not dissolve in this little liquid.
- The hot coffee is the hingeTwo tablespoons of genuinely strong hot coffee both flavours the frosting and dissolves the sugar. Use espresso or a double-strength brew, and add it in a thin stream while beating so the butter does not break.
- Butter temperatureA quarter cup is half a stick, 2 oz. It must be properly soft — 65–68°F — or the hot coffee will melt part of it and leave the rest in flecks.
- CocoaA single teaspoon is for colour and depth rather than chocolate flavour. Natural unsweetened cocoa is the likelier match, though the recipe does not specify; Dutch-process gives a darker, milder result.
- Five minutes of mixingBy hand with a wooden spoon that is about right. With a stand mixer on medium, two to three minutes is enough — beat past that and the frosting warms and slackens.
- If it slumpsToo thin means the coffee was over-measured or the butter too warm. Beat in sifted sugar a tablespoon at a time, or chill ten minutes and re-whip briefly before spreading.
Mocha frosting takes its name from the port of Mokha in Yemen, long the shipping point for the coffee that Europeans and North Americans came to treat as the standard of quality; by the late nineteenth century "mocha" on a menu or in a cookbook meant coffee flavour, and the coffee-plus-chocolate meaning we now assume came later. It appears in the Five Roses Cook Book — a milling company's promotional collection, assembled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives and reissued for decades from its first edition in the 1910s. A creamed butter-and-sugar frosting needs no candy thermometer, no sugar syrup brought to a thread, and no judgment about soft-ball stage: it needs only good butter and a strong pot of coffee, both of which a farm or town kitchen already had on hand.