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Coffee Frosting
Confectioners' Frosting No. 1 2 tablespoons black coffee Follow directions for Confectioners' Frosting No. 1. 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup sugar
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's Confectioners' Frosting No. 1 in front of you and simply swaps in coffee as the liquid. The ingredient line as printed is jumbled, and it helps to know what the base actually is before you start.
- What the base frosting isConfectioners' frosting of this era is generally uncooked: sifted confectioners' sugar worked with a few tablespoons of liquid until it is smooth and just spreadable. The base recipe is not reprinted here, but this type of frosting normally involves no boiling and no thermometer.
- The garbled ingredient lineThe order of the printed lines is scrambled, and it is not clear whether "2 tablespoons butter" and "1 cup sugar" belong to this entry or to a neighbouring one. Read as a coffee confectioners' frosting, roughly a cup of confectioners' sugar to 2 tablespoons of coffee will work; if butter is included, cream 2 tablespoons of softened butter into the sugar first and expect to need a little less liquid.
- Sugar is not granulatedThe "1 cup sugar" in a confectioners' frosting means confectioners' (powdered) sugar. Granulated sugar will not dissolve and gives a gritty frosting.
- Black coffeeStrong brewed coffee with no milk or cream. Make it about double strength, or use 2 tablespoons of cooled coffee brewed from freshly ground beans, since two tablespoons is all the flavor the frosting gets. Instant coffee dissolved in a little hot water is a workable modern substitute.
- Consistency is judged, not measuredAdd the coffee a teaspoon at a time. The frosting should hold a soft ribbon and level itself slowly; too thin and it runs off the cake, too thick and it tears the crumb.
- YieldAbout a cup of sugar's worth of frosting covers the top of one 8- or 9-inch layer, or thinly glazes a dozen small cakes. Double it to fill and cover a two-layer cake.
- SettingIt firms as it dries rather than as it cools. Leave the cake uncovered for an hour before stacking or boxing, or the surface will stay tacky.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, in the first decade of the twentieth century. Books issued by food companies were advertising as much as instruction, which is why the dessert chapters run long and why the frostings are organized as a small system: a numbered base recipe followed by short variations that change only the liquid or the flavoring. Coffee as a cake flavoring was well established in American and English baking by then, and one common form was strong black coffee standing in for the milk or water in an uncooked sugar icing. The terseness of the entry is typical of the period's house style.