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Cocoa Frosting
1 cup confectioners' sugar 1 egg white 1 teaspoon flavoring + cup Lowney's Cocoa 1 tablespoon cream or milk 1 teaspoon butter Beat white of egg, sugar and cocoa for five minutes. Add flavoring, milk and melted butter. Spread on cake, when cool.
Cocoa Frosting No. 2 1 cup confectioners' sugar 4 tablespoons strong coffee + cup Lowney's Cocoa teaspoon salt Mix cocoa and sugar ; add hot coffee. Stir over fire five minutes. Add salt and spread on cake.
Two frostings sit under one heading here: the first is beaten raw and never heated, the second is cooked over direct heat. Only the second is sound by current practice.
- The raw egg whiteFrosting No. 1 beats an uncooked egg white with sugar and cocoa and goes straight onto the cake. Nothing in the method brings the egg to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the sugar concentration in a spreadable icing is not high enough to be relied on as a preservative. Use a current recipe if you want a beaten-white icing; pasteurised whites and cooked meringue methods both exist for exactly this reason.
- Lowney's CocoaAn unsweetened American cocoa, almost certainly natural (non-alkalised), as most US cocoas of the period were. Any unsweetened natural cocoa stands in; Dutch-process will give a darker colour and a milder, less fruity chocolate flavour.
- Confectioners' sugarPeriod confectioners' sugar was less uniform than today's 10X icing sugar, which carries up to about 3 percent cornstarch. Sift it with the cocoa before mixing either version or the frosting stays gritty.
- "Flavoring"Unspecified, as was common when vanilla extract was assumed. A teaspoon of vanilla is the default reading; other extracts of the period, almond among them, would also fit.
- Stir over fire five minutesThe book gives no heat level. Read as gentle direct heat with constant stirring rather than a boil; the aim is to dissolve the sugar and cook out the raw cocoa taste, and if it thickens noticeably it will set before it reaches the cake.
- Strong coffeeBrewed coffee made strong, not espresso and not instant granules. Four tablespoons to a cup of sugar makes a thin frosting, closer to a glaze than to a buttercream, though the book directs that it be spread.
- CoverageA cup of sugar should make roughly enough of either to cover the top of one 8- or 9-inch layer, or to glaze a small loaf. Double it to fill and frost a two-layer cake.
Lowney's cook books were published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and belong to a large genre of turn-of-the-century promotional cookery books in which every chocolate-bearing recipe names the firm's own product. Cocoa frostings like these spread quickly once inexpensive tinned cocoa powder became a pantry staple in the 1890s: cocoa dissolved into sugar without the tempering and melting that block chocolate demanded, so an ordinary household could put a chocolate finish on a plain cake in a few minutes. The two versions here show the period's two standard approaches side by side, an uncooked egg-white icing and a boiled sugar glaze, the latter using coffee rather than water on what was often said to be the principle that coffee deepens the taste of chocolate.