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Ingredients for the Icing
Half a pound of fresh Butter.
One pound of Icing Sugar.
One tablespoonful of Essence of Coffee.
Beat the yolks of the eggs with the castor sugar, adding the flour and baking powder gradually, then stir in lightly the four whites of eggs whipped to a stiff froth; butter a plain mould, pour in the mixture, and bake in a quick oven for thirty minutes. When done, turn it out, and when quite cold, cover it with the icing, and decorate to taste with the icing squeezed through the icing forcers. To make the icing, beat the butter and sugar together in a T2 basin to a smooth cream, adding the coffee to it one drop at a time. When the cake is iced, stand it away on ice or in a cool place till required.
The heading covers the icing only, but the text that follows carries the method for both a whisked sponge and the coffee buttercream that goes over it. The cake quantities are missing from this page, so read it as an icing recipe with a cake attached.
- The missing cake quantitiesYolks, castor sugar, flour, baking powder and four whites are called for, but only the four whites are numbered. Four-egg sponges of this type are often built on roughly equal weights of sugar and flour -- something like 4 oz (115 g) of each with a teaspoon of baking powder -- but the book does not say so here; treat the amounts as genuinely absent rather than implied.
- Icing weightsHalf a pound of butter is 225 g, one pound of icing sugar 450 g. That 1:2 ratio makes a firm, very sweet buttercream that pipes cleanly and holds its shape, which is the point of it.
- Essence of coffeeA liquid coffee concentrate, often sweetened, and in commercial bottled form frequently blended with chicory (Camp coffee is the surviving example); some cookery books give recipes for a plain home-made coffee essence instead. Coffee extract, or a tablespoon of cooled espresso reduced to a syrup, does the same job, as does instant coffee dissolved in a few drops of hot water.
- Adding the coffee drop by dropThis is the hinge of the icing. Liquid poured into a butter-and-sugar cream splits it; added a drop at a time and beaten in, it emulsifies. If it does curdle, keep beating rather than adding more sugar.
- "A quick oven"Conventionally read as somewhere around 400-425F (200-220C). For a plain whisked sponge in a mould that is hot for thirty minutes; nearer 375F (190C) suits a modern oven, testing at 25 minutes.
- "A T2 basin"Most likely a printing or transcription artefact for "a basin". Read it as an ordinary mixing bowl.
- Icing forcersThe Victorian term for a piping syringe with interchangeable metal tubes. A piping bag with a star nozzle does the same job.
- "Stand it away on ice"Meant the icebox or a cold larder. This buttercream is stable at cool room temperature; refrigerating it sets the butter hard, so bring the cake back to room temperature for an hour before serving or the icing will taste waxy.
- YieldA four-egg sponge in a plain mould serves eight to ten. The icing quantity is generous for one cake of that size and will comfortably cover and decorate it.
Coffee as a cake flavouring in British cookery of this period often arrived as a bottled essence rather than as brewed coffee, since a concentrate gave colour and strength without adding water to a butter icing. The best known of these commercial essences, a chicory-and-coffee syrup, was on sale from the later 1870s and was widely used for coffee cakes and creams. The icing belongs to the period when the piping syringe, or "forcer", was becoming available to ambitious private households as well as confectioners: a firm butter-and-sugar cream that could be pushed through a metal tube and hold a rosette was a technique worth setting out on its own.