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BEVERAGES (Reheat any cold coffee until)
Reheat any cold coffee until very hot and blend it with the cocoa. Add the butter and stir in the sugar, and beat until smooth. Add the vanilla, and spread at once on a slightly warm cake.
Despite sitting under a heading about beverages, this is a mocha butter icing built on yesterday's coffee. The text is a fragment: it gives a sequence but no quantities, so treat it as a method and supply your own proportions.
- No quantities are givenThe original assumes the cook knows a butter icing. A workable modern set of proportions is about 2 tablespoons hot strong coffee, 2 tablespoons cocoa, 3 tablespoons softened butter, and about 1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar, with 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Adjust with a little more coffee or sugar until it spreads.
- Which sugarAn icing beaten smooth without cooking means powdered sugar; period books often call it simply "sugar" or "XXXX sugar." Granulated will stay gritty here.
- Hot coffee first, for a reasonBlending the cocoa into the coffee while it is genuinely hot hydrates it and draws out the flavor, which is what keeps the icing from tasting dusty. Do this before the butter goes anywhere near it.
- Butter temperatureAdd the butter to the warm cocoa paste soft, not melted. Fully melted butter will separate and the icing will look oily rather than glossy.
- Cocoa typeNatural cocoa gives a sharper, redder flavor; Dutch-process is mellower and darker. Either works, since nothing here relies on cocoa's acidity for leavening.
- "Slightly warm cake"Warm cake lets the icing flow and set to a thin shell. Slightly warm means barely above room temperature; on a hot cake the butter melts out and the icing soaks in and slides.
- Coffee strengthIf the mocha flavor is faint, reduce the coffee by half in a small pan before using it, or add a pinch of instant espresso powder.
- YieldThe proportions above cover the top and sides of one 8- or 9-inch layer, or the top of a 9x13 sheet cake.
Books of "left overs" were a small industry in American domestic-science publishing in the first decades of the twentieth century, when household economy was taught as a moral as much as a financial discipline, and cold coffee in the pot was exactly the sort of thing a good manager was expected to redeem rather than pour away. Coffee and chocolate together were sold under the name mocha, borrowed from the Yemeni port of Mokha that once supplied Europe's coffee and by then attached to any coffee-flavored sweet regardless of origin. The pairing suited icings especially well because coffee's bitterness cuts the flatness of a very sugary butter frosting. That this instruction landed in a chapter on beverages, with no quantities attached, suggests the reader was assumed to know already how a frosting behaved and to need only the idea.