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Butter Cream, Cocoa and White
Work 1/3 cup washed or fresh sweet butter until very light and creamy, add 1 cup sifted confectioners' sugar and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla very gradually, and beat until very light. Reserve 2 tablespoons mixture for decoration. Divide remainder in two portions. To one portion add 1 tablespoon dry cocoa. Whip 4 tablespoons cream and add two-thirds of it to the white butter cream and fold remainder into that which contains the cocoa. Use as filling for cakes.
A plain uncooked buttercream split into white and cocoa halves, lightened with whipped cream. The whipped cream is the reason this needs a little care: it makes the filling delicate and highly perishable.
- Sweet butter, and washing it"Sweet" butter means unsalted. "Washed" butter was butter kneaded under cold water to press out buttermilk and surplus salt, a step that mattered when butter was locally churned and inconsistently salted. Modern unsalted butter needs no washing.
- Butter temperatureThe butter must be genuinely soft, around 65F, before beating. Too cold and the sugar will not cream in; melted and the filling will never hold air, which is the whole point of "beat until very light."
- Confectioners' sugarConfectioners' sugar of the period lumped readily, which is likely why the recipe calls for sifting. Sift modern powdered sugar too, since it cakes in the box, and add it gradually as directed rather than all at once.
- Dry cocoaThis means unsweetened cocoa powder, most likely natural rather than Dutch-process in an American kitchen of the period. One tablespoon into roughly half the batch gives a mild, pale chocolate; two will taste more strongly of chocolate.
- Whipping four tablespoonsA quarter cup of cream is an awkwardly small amount for a stand mixer. Whip it by hand in a chilled bowl, or with a small whisk attachment, to soft peaks only. Overwhipped cream will break into the butter and make the filling grainy.
- Fold, do not beatOnce the cream goes in, fold. Beating knocks out the air and the filling loses the lightness the recipe twice calls for.
- Keeping and servingWith uncooked whipped cream in it, this is not a shelf-stable frosting. Fill the cake the day it is served and keep it refrigerated; let it stand 20 minutes at room temperature before cutting so the butter softens.
- YieldAbout one and a quarter cups after the cream is folded in, enough to fill a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake generously, or to fill and lightly top a smaller one. The reserved two tablespoons is for piping a border or a few rosettes.
Uncooked buttercream of this kind, butter creamed with confectioners' sugar rather than boiled sugar syrup, is generally said to have become a standard American cake filling once finely powdered sugar was cheap and reliably available at the grocer. The European traditions leaned on cooked bases with egg yolk or meringue. The two touches that appear to date this particular recipe are the reference to washed butter, often traced to the era of farm-churned butter carrying variable salt and buttermilk, and the folding in of whipped cream, apparently a trick for stretching a modest amount of butter into a lighter, more generous filling. Splitting one batch into white and cocoa halves meant that a single mixing produced two-toned layers and a piped decoration without a second bowl of work.