Mocha Torte
3/4 cup sifted flour 6 eggs 3/4 cup sugar (half pulverized) 1 tablespoon essence Turkish coffee 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 cup whipped cream Beat the sugar thoroughly with the yolks of the eggs; then add the coffee, and the sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the well-beaten whites. Bake in two layers and put the whipped cream between the layers.
For the icing use one cup of pulverized sugar, one tablespoon of boiling water and one tablespoon of coffee essence. PATRIOTIC CAKE (1776 RECIPE) 1 pound risen bread dough 2 cups brown sugar 1 cup butter 3 eggs 2 tablespoons cream 1 level teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon water 1/2 pound currants 1/2 pound seeded raisins 1 level teaspoon cloves 1 level teaspoon nutmeg To the risen bread dough add the other ingredients, dissolving the soda in the water and having the currants and raisins thoroughly washed and drained. Pour the mixture into a greased pan and set it in a warm place to rise for twenty minutes. Bake in a moderate oven and when cool, ice and ornament with candied cherries.
Two cakes share this leaf: a fatless coffee sponge layered with cream, and an older-style cake built on risen bread dough. Both assume knowledge the page does not spell out.
- Pulverized sugarThis is powdered or confectioners' sugar, so "3/4 cup sugar (half pulverized)" means half granulated and half powdered. The recipe has all of it beaten with the yolks; it does not say why the split is called for, though the powdered half dissolves more readily.
- Essence of Turkish coffeeA concentrated coffee extract sold by grocers and druggists at the time. A tablespoon of very strong cooled espresso, or a teaspoon of instant espresso powder dissolved in a scant tablespoon of water, gives the same intensity without watering down the batter.
- The hinge: folding, not stirringThree-quarters of a cup of flour to six eggs means the whites are the entire structure — there is no butter and almost no flour to hold it up. Beat the whites to soft, glossy peaks and fold them in alternately with the flour by hand. Stir them in and the torte will bake flat and rubbery.
- Pans and oven for the torteThe recipe names neither pan size nor oven heat. Two 8- or 9-inch layers at about 350F for 18 to 22 minutes suits a sponge this thin; the layers are done when the centre springs back.
- The icing is a thin glazeOne cup powdered sugar with a tablespoon of boiling water and a tablespoon of coffee essence gives a stiff uncooked glaze; loosen it with a few drops more liquid to pour, or add sugar to spread. It sets to a firm, sweet shell.
- Assembly and keepingA cream-filled torte will not sit. Fill it the day it is served and refrigerate. The recipe does not say whether the cream is sweetened. Two thin layers of this size cut into eight to ten wedges.
- "1 pound risen bread dough"For the Patriotic Cake this means about a pound of plain white yeast dough after its first rise — roughly the amount made from 2 to 2 1/2 cups of flour. A pound of thawed frozen bread dough, risen once, is the practical substitute.
- Washing the fruitCurrants and raisins a century ago arrived gritty and stemmed by hand, hence the instruction to wash and drain. Modern packaged fruit needs no washing, but drying it and tossing it in a little of the flour still keeps it from sinking.
- Oven and timing for the dough cake"Moderate" is 350F. In a greased 9-inch tube or deep square pan this dense, sugary dough wants 50 to 70 minutes; tent it with foil if the top darkens before the centre sets. The 20-minute rise in a warm place is what lightens it — the teaspoon of soda alone will not.
Mocha as a cake flavour is named for the Yemeni port of Mokha, long the shipping point for Arabian coffee, and by 1900 the word had drifted from a place to a promise: coffee, often coffee with chocolate. "Essence of Turkish coffee" belongs to the era when bottled flavouring extracts were a normal grocery purchase, and the cake itself is a fatless egg sponge, split and filled, rather than a butter cake. The Patriotic Cake beneath it looks back much further. Cakes leavened with a lump of the day's bread dough were standard before chemical leaveners were reliable, and calling such a recipe a "1776 recipe" seems to have been a publishing flourish of the sort colonial-revival cookbooks favoured, giving old dough cakes a Revolutionary pedigree; the date should be read as an appeal to sentiment rather than documented provenance. The teaspoon of soda in the same recipe shows the transition caught mid-step he leleavener added for insurance.