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Walnut Mocha Cake
½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup coffee infusion 1¾ cups flour 21½ teaspoons baking powder Whites 3 eggs ¾ cup walnut meats, broken in pieces Follow directions for mixing butter cake mixtures. Cover with Confectioners' Frosting, using cream, and flavoring with vanilla. ½ cup butter
A plain butter cake in which the liquid is strong coffee rather than milk, finished with a vanilla cream frosting. Fannie Farmer's shorthand assumes you already know the standard butter-cake method, so the mixing is worth spelling out.
- The method it points to"Butter cake mixtures" means cream the softened butter, add the sugar gradually and beat until light, then add the coffee alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder, and fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites last. The nuts go in with the final addition of flour so they stay suspended.
- Coffee infusionThis is simply brewed coffee, made strong and then cooled. Hot coffee will melt the creamed butter and the batter will curdle; brew it well ahead. Half a cup is the whole liquid content of the cake, so weak coffee gives a cake that tastes of nothing in particular.
- QuantitiesThe flour, baking powder and walnut figures in this printing have lost their fractions and cannot be read with confidence. For a cake built on half a cup of butter, a cup of sugar and three egg whites, the proportions in the rest of the book run to roughly 1¾ cups flour and 2½ teaspoons baking powder, with ¾ cup nuts — but treat that as inference, not as the book's own figure.
- OvenNo temperature is given in this recipe. Bake at 350°F. In a single 8-inch pan allow 30 to 35 minutes; in two layers, 20 to 25.
- Egg whitesBeat them to soft, glossy peaks rather than dry and grainy, and fold rather than stir. They are the only lift this cake has beyond the baking powder, and an overbeaten white collapses on contact with a heavy batter.
- Walnuts"Walnut meats" means shelled kernels. Break them by hand into pieces the size of a pea; chopped fine they disappear into the crumb. Toasting them for eight minutes at 350°F before they go in sharpens the flavour considerably.
- The frostingConfectioners' frosting made with cream is icing sugar beaten with enough cream to spread, flavoured with vanilla — no cooking, no thermometer. Add the cream a teaspoon at a time; it goes from stiff to runny very quickly.
- YieldThe recipe names no pan or yield; the quantities suit about one 8-inch layer cake, eight to ten slices. The crumb is likely closer and drier than a modern cake, so the frosting earns its place.
"Mocha" in this period generally signals coffee rather than the coffee-and-chocolate pairing the word implies today; the name derives from the Yemeni port of Mocha (al-Mukha), long the shipping point for Arabian coffee, and by the turn of the century it was being applied fairly loosely to coffee-flavoured confectionery. Coffee appears as a cake liquid in American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, standing in for milk and giving a brown crumb and faintly bitter edge that suits the walnuts. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book organises its cake chapter around a handful of master methods, and this entry is a good illustration of Fannie Farmer's system at work: the reader is given proportions and a cross-reference to "butter cake mixtures" and expected to supply the rest, which was precisely the standardising habit that made the book influential.