Mocha Cake
Five eggs; one cup of powdered sugar; one cup of flour; one teaspoon of baking powder; one and one-half tablespoon of Mocha extract. Beat the egg yolks with the sugar and add the extract, then the flour and baking powder, and lastly the whites of the eggs beaten to a froth. Bake and arrange as for layer cake.
For the Filling-Take one-half pint of cream whipped to a froth, add one and one-half tablespoons of Mocha extract and sugar to taste.
Icing for the Top-Take one cup of confectioners' sugar, mixed with one and one-half tablespoon of Mocha extract, and add water to make it smooth enough to spread.
Instead of icing the top of this cake, the same cream used for filling may be spread over the top, and upon it sprinkled very thickly three-fourths cup of a chopped nut meats. COCOANUT CAKE, No. 1-This cake can be baked in layer tins instead of one loaf, but it is not nearly so delicate. Cream together one-half cup of soft butter and one and one-half cups of sugar; to this add one-half cup of milk and then gradually stir in two and one-fourth cups of flour and one teaspoon of baking powder. Flavor with one-half teaspoon of vanilla and ten drops of almond. This gives a delicate pistachio flavor. Lastly, stir in the whites of five eggs that have been whipped until stiff and dry. This cake mixture will be rather stiff and hard to beat. It makes a delicious plain cake baked in a loaf and iced.
For the Filling-Soak two tablespoons of gelatine until soft, then heat until dissolved. Beat the whites of three large eggs stiff, add one-half cup of sugar, two tablespoons of the dissolved gelatine and one and one-half cups of grated cocoanut. Spread upon the layers and cover the top and sides with plain icing, sprinkled with dry cocoanut.
COCOANUT CAKE. No. 2-Use the recipe for Layer Cake, and fill with Cocoanut Filling. See chapter on Cake Fillings and Frostings.
A butterless sponge in the fatless "hot-milk-less" style, leavened by egg and a little baking powder, with a coffee-flavored cream between the layers. The book assumes you already know how to bake a layer cake, so the two things it leaves out are the pan and the oven.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirWith no butter, the whipped whites are most of the structure. "Beaten to a froth" suggests whites beaten light rather than stiff; fold them into the finished yolk-and-flour batter in additions with a spatula, until barely combined.
- Powdered sugar meant something elseIn this period "powdered sugar" generally meant a fine-grained white sugar, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Use superfine granulated in the cake; use true confectioners' sugar only where the recipe names it, in the top icing.
- Pans and ovenThe recipe specifies neither pan nor heat. Two 8-inch round layers, greased and floured or paper-lined, bake well at around 350F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the top springs back; three thinner layers take about 15 minutes. A hotter oven tends to dome and crack a sponge this lean.
- Mocha extractA commercial coffee flavoring of the period, now hard to find. For 1 1/2 tablespoons, substitute 1 1/2 tablespoons very strong cold espresso or 2 teaspoons instant espresso powder dissolved in a tablespoon of water; if you want the chocolate note that "mocha" later came to imply, add a scant teaspoon of cocoa.
- Whipped-cream fillingHalf a pint is one cup of heavy cream, yielding about two cups whipped. Sweeten with 2 to 3 tablespoons sugar. It will weep within a few hours: fill the cake close to serving, or stabilize the cream, and keep the assembled cake refrigerated.
- The water icingOne cup confectioners' sugar takes very little liquid. Add water a half teaspoon at a time after the extract; you want it thick enough to hold its edge on the top layer rather than run down the sides.
- YieldOne 8-inch two-layer cake, 8 to 10 slices.
- On the coconut filling that followsCocoanut Cake No. 1 sets its filling with gelatine and raw egg whites that are never cooked. If you make it, use pasteurized whites, or use a boiled (7-minute) frosting as the base instead. Note also that "grated cocoanut" meant fresh coconut, which is far moister than packaged sweetened shred.
"Mocha" is a place name before it is a flavor: Al-Mukha, the Yemeni port that shipped much of Europe's early coffee, and by the nineteenth century the word had drifted to mean coffee flavoring generally. That drift is why turn-of-the-century American cake chapters call for "Mocha extract" from a bottle rather than brewed coffee; flavoring extracts were a booming grocery category by 1900, and a cookbook aimed at the Butterick pattern-buying housewife could safely assume one on the shelf. The cake itself belongs to the American sponge tradition rather than to the European mocha tortes built on buttercream: no butter, five eggs doing the lifting, and whipped cream between the layers, which is a recipe that presumably suited a household with reliable cold storage and a reason to serve the cake the day it is made.