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Mocha Frosting
Mix to a cream one and one-half cups confectioners' sugar and one-third of a cup of butter. Beat thoroughly and add one tablespoon of breakfast cocoa and enough strong coffee to make it of the right consistency to spread. This is much used as a decoration for small cakes, it being forced through a pastry bag and tube in ornamental designs.
CHOCOLATE FROSTING No. 1-Melt two squares of chocolate, add one teaspoon of melted butter and three tablespoons of hot water. Flavor with one-fourth teaspoon of vanilla and stir in sufficient confectioners' sugar to make of the right consistency to spread.
CHOCOLATE FROSTING, No. 2-Use one ounce of chocolate (one square); three tablespoons of sugar; one tablespoon of water. Place these ingredients together in a small frying-pan, and stir over a hot fire until the mixture is smooth and glossy. Beat the white of one egg enough to thin it, but not so as to make it frothy; add eight even tablespoons of powdered sugar, stir until perfectly smooth and light, and put in the chocolate. One-half teaspoon of vanilla may be added if desired.
Three related frostings on one page: a coffee-chocolate buttercream and two chocolate glazes. The mocha and the first chocolate frosting are straightforward by modern standards; the second is not, because it finishes with a raw egg white.
- The raw egg in Chocolate Frosting No. 2The beaten white is stirred into eight tablespoons of sugar and a small quantity of hot chocolate, then spread and left to stand. That much cold sugar and egg drops the temperature immediately, so nothing in the bowl comes near the 160F needed to make egg safe, and the frosting is eaten uncooked. Use a current recipe if you want a glossy egg-white icing; pasteurised whites and meringue powder exist for exactly this purpose.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate; the recipe says as much itself. Baking chocolate is now usually sold in larger bars scored into portions, so weigh it. It is not semisweet; substituting chips will make both chocolate frostings cloying, since the sugar is already accounted for.
- Breakfast cocoaAn early trade term for unsweetened cocoa with a relatively high cocoa-butter content; the familiar 22 percent minimum belongs to later regulatory definition rather than to the period itself. Plain natural unsweetened cocoa is the right stand-in; Dutch-processed will taste milder and darker.
- Confectioners' sugarThen as now, finely ground sugar. Sift before creaming or the frosting will not pipe cleanly.
- The coffee"Strong coffee" means brewed coffee at drinking strength or a little beyond, added a teaspoon at a time. Cold or room-temperature coffee is better here than hot, which will loosen the butter and slacken the frosting past the point of piping.
- A hot fireFor the chocolate-sugar-water mixture in the frying pan, read this as medium heat, stirring constantly. Chocolate scorches quickly on a modern burner and the mixture only needs to go smooth and glossy, not boil.
- YieldNot stated, and not fixed: both chocolate frostings are thinned or thickened "to the right consistency," so the final volume depends on how much sugar or liquid you add. Expect roughly a cup or so from the mocha frosting and rather less from each chocolate one.
Mocha as a flavour name comes from the Yemeni port of al-Mukha, for centuries the shipping point for coffee bound for Europe; by the nineteenth century "Mocha" on a tin meant a particular grade of coffee, and in confectionery it came to mean coffee flavour generally, and then the pairing of coffee with chocolate. The frosting here uses both senses at once: cocoa and strong coffee together, creamed with butter and sugar rather than boiled as a sugar syrup. That butter-and-icing-sugar method is what makes the recipe pipeable, and the note about forcing it through a bag and tube is the point of it.