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Mocha Icing and Filling
1 tablespoon butter 1 cup confectioner's sugar 1 tablespoon cocoa 2 tablespoons strong coffee 1/4 teaspoon salt Cream butter and sugar; add cocoa, coffee and salt and stir until smooth. If too dry, add coffee; if too moist, add sugar.
A lean, old-style coffee icing that leans on sugar rather than butter, so it spreads thin and sets firm. A few notes on quantities and technique.
- What the measures come toOne cup of confectioner's sugar is about 4 oz (115 g); a tablespoon of butter is 14 g. The whole batch makes roughly half a cup of icing.
- Yield and how far it goesAbout enough to fill thinly between two 8-inch layers, or to glaze the top of a single layer. To cover the top and sides of a two-layer cake you would need two or three times as much.
- This is not buttercreamOne tablespoon of butter to a cup of sugar gives a firm, slightly crisp icing in the older style, closer to a glaze. It will not stay soft and pipeable, so spread it while it is freshly mixed.
- Soften the butter firstButter at room temperature creams into the sugar; cold butter leaves specks that never smooth out. A minute of vigorous beating with a spoon is sufficient at this small scale.
- The coffee"Strong coffee" is not defined in the recipe; read it as brewed coffee on the strong side, or reduce ordinary coffee slightly. Warm coffee dissolves the cocoa and sugar more readily than cold and gives a smoother finish.
- CocoaUse unsweetened cocoa powder. Natural cocoa is the likelier assumption for an American recipe of this kind, though the text does not specify; Dutch-process is milder and darker and will read less sharply against the coffee.
- Sift the sugarConfectioner's sugar cakes and lumps in storage, then as now. Sifting the sugar and cocoa together prevents gritty bits that stirring will not break down.
- SaltA quarter teaspoon is assertive in this small a quantity of icing. If your butter is salted, cut the added salt to a pinch.
- AdjustingAdd liquid a few drops at a time. The mixture goes from stiff to runny very quickly at this volume, and the fix is more sugar, which shifts the balance sweeter.
"Mocha" as a flavor name comes from Al Mokha, the Yemeni port that supplied much of Europe's early coffee; by the nineteenth century the word had drifted from a place of origin to a shorthand for coffee flavor, and then to the coffee-and-chocolate pairing familiar today. Coffee icings became common in American cake chapters once cocoa powder was cheap and reliably available in tins around the turn of the twentieth century; household cookbooks had already begun appearing under the imprint of baking powder and cocoa manufacturers in the 1870s and 1880s. The very small proportion of butter here is typical of the period's plain icings: fat was the expensive ingredient, sugar was not.