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Mocha Frosting
1/3 cup butter 1½ cups confectioners' sugar 1 tablespoon breakfast cocoa Coffee infusion Cream butter, and add sugar gradually, continuing the beating; then add cocoa and coffee infusion, drop by drop, until of right consistency to spread or force through a pastry bag and tube.
A plain butter frosting flavored with cocoa and strong coffee, thinned by the drop so it can be either spread or piped. The only real technique is restraint with the liquid.
- Coffee infusionThis means strong brewed coffee, cooled — roughly double-strength drip coffee or a shot of espresso works. Instant coffee dissolved in a teaspoon of water is a fair substitute; avoid hot coffee, which will soften the butter and slacken the frosting.
- Breakfast cocoaAn unsweetened cocoa with a comparatively high fat content, standard in American groceries around 1900. Any modern unsweetened natural or Dutch-process cocoa stands in; Dutch-process gives a darker color and rounder flavor.
- Drop by drop is literalThe recipe adds liquid only until the frosting reaches spreading or piping consistency. Add the coffee a few drops at a time, beating between additions, and stop as soon as the frosting holds a peak that just barely relaxes.
- Butter temperatureThe butter should be cool but pliable, around 65F. Warm butter beats to a greasy paste that will not hold a rosette, and the frosting will slump on the cake in a warm room.
- SiftingConfectioners' sugar of the period commonly needed sifting, and modern sugar still clumps. Sift the sugar and the cocoa together before adding or you will be picking out specks that never dissolve.
- YieldRoughly 1 to 1¼ cups, depending on how much coffee is worked in — about enough to cover the top and sides of a single 8-inch layer, or to pipe borders and rosettes on a larger cake.
- Holding and storingIt firms up in the refrigerator; bring it back to room temperature and beat it briefly before piping. Refrigerate a frosted cake only if the kitchen is hot, since chilling dulls the coffee flavor.
"Mocha" in turn-of-the-century American cookery meant coffee, and often coffee with chocolate, the name borrowed from Al Mokha, the Yemeni Red Sea port that shipped the coffee Europe first came to know. By the time this book was compiled, mocha frosting was a standard on the confectioner's list — butter, powdered sugar, cocoa and coffee, uncooked, alongside the boiled sugar-syrup frostings of the surrounding pages. Uncooked butter frostings are often said to have become practical for home cooks once finely milled confectioners' sugar was cheap and widely sold, which happened over the last decades of the nineteenth century; before that, a smooth icing generally meant working with a sugar syrup and a good eye for the thread stage. The instruction to "force through a pastry bag and tube" reflects the same period's enthusiasm for decorated cakes at home, a domesticated version of what professional bakers had been doing in shop windows.