Mocha Cakes
Bake a sponge cake mixture in sheets. Shape in small rounds, and cut in three layers. Put layers together with a thin coating of frosting. Spread frosting around sides and roll in shredded cocoanut. Ornament top with frosting forced through a pastry bag and tube, using the rose tube. Begin at centre of top and coil frosting around until surface is covered. Garnish centre of top with a candied cherry. Frosting. Wash one-third cup butter, add one cup powdered sugar gradually, and beat until creamy. Then add one cup Cream Filling which has been cooled. Flavor with onehalf teaspoon vanilla and one and one-half squares melted chocolate.
This frosting is sometimes colored pink, yellow, green, or lavender, and flavored with rose, vanilla, or a combination of almond and vanilla. Large Mocha Cakes are baked in two round layer cake tins, each cake being cut in two layers. Layers are put together as small cakes. The top is spread smoothly with frosting, then ornamented with large pieces of candied fruits arranged in a design, and frosting forced through pastry bag and tube.
A pastry-shop construction rather than a home cake: sponge sheet, cut rounds, split, filled and piped with a butter-and-pastry-cream frosting. The frosting is the part that needs attention.
- The frosting is a custard buttercream"Cream Filling" is the book's stovetop pastry cream (milk, sugar, flour or cornstarch, egg, cooked until thick). It must be completely cold before it goes into the creamed butter, or the whole thing will slacken into soup. Add it a spoonful at a time and beat between additions.
- Perishable once assembledBecause of the pastry cream, these are not a cake to leave on the sideboard for two days. Keep them refrigerated and bring back to cool room temperature before serving; the buttercream firms up hard when cold.
- "Wash" the butterAn old step for salted, farm-churned butter: work it under cold water with a spoon or your hands to rinse out salt and residual buttermilk, then press dry. With modern unsalted butter, skip it entirely and simply cream the butter soft.
- Powdered sugarIn this book powdered sugar means finely ground granulated, closer to today's caster or superfine, not confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Either works here; confectioners' sugar gives a slightly softer, chalkier set.
- Squares of chocolateOne square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so one and a half squares is about 42 g. Melt it and let it cool to barely warm before beating in, or it will seize the butter into specks.
- Baking the sheetNo temperature is given. A thin sponge sheet wants a moderate oven, 350F, for roughly 12-15 minutes, until it springs back. Bake it on parchment so it lifts cleanly; a sheet baked too dark at the edges will not cut into neat rounds.
- Cutting three layers from a sheetA sheet cake baked in a standard jelly-roll pan is only about half an inch deep, which will not split into three. Bake the batter thicker, in a pan of around 9 by 13 inches, or bake two sheets and stack. Cut the rounds with a 2-inch cutter, chilled cake cuts cleanest.
- Shredded cocoanutPeriod shredded coconut was generally unsweetened and drier than most supermarket bags today. Unsweetened desiccated or flaked coconut is the closer match; sweetened flake will make an already sweet cake cloying.
- YieldA 9 by 13 sheet gives roughly 15-18 small rounds, depending on the cutter and how much trim you accept. The frosting has to fill the layers, mask the sides and coil the top of each cake, so judge as you go and make a second batch if you run short.
Mocha is the anglicised name of Al-Mokha, the Yemeni Red Sea port that shipped coffee to Europe from the sixteenth century onward, and by the nineteenth century the word had become shorthand for coffee flavour; the coffee-and-chocolate sense appears to be a later, chiefly American usage. Continental confectioners built a whole genre on it, the German and Austrian Mokkatorte being the best known: sponge layers, a butter-and-custard cream, and elaborate piped rosettes. What is striking about the version here is that it contains no coffee at all, only chocolate and vanilla, and the note that the frosting may equally be tinted pink or green and flavoured with rose suggests that by the time the name reached the Boston Cooking School it described a style of small iced layer cake rather than a flavour. That style, small rounds masked in buttercream, rolled in coconut, coiled with rosettes from a rose tube and finished with a candied cherry, belongs squarely to the professional pastry counter, and its appearance in a domestic cookbook may reflect the school's ambition to teach home cooks the fancy work of the confectioner.