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Cocoa and Coffee Icing
1 cup confectioner's sugar. 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla. 1 cup confectioner's sugar 4 teaspoonfuls cocoa 1 teaspoonful butter teaspoonful vanilla 2 tablespoonfuls of hot coffee
A quick uncooked icing built on confectioner's sugar, with cocoa and hot coffee doing the work of both liquid and flavour. The proportions are workable as given, but the method is left entirely to the cook.
- Method, since none is givenSift the sugar and cocoa together, work in the softened butter and vanilla, then beat in the hot coffee a little at a time until it spreads evenly.
- The coffee must be hotHeat helps dissolve the sugar and disperse the cocoa. Cold coffee is likelier to leave the icing gritty.
- Cocoa, then and nowThe cocoa in a book of this kind was usually natural (non-alkalised) and fairly sharp; Dutch-process cocoa gives a darker, milder result. Either works here, as nothing is leavened.
- Confectioner's sugarThe same thing as modern powdered or icing sugar, though older grinds were coarser. Sift it even if the box says no lumps, since there is no cooking step to rescue you.
- Consistency controlTwo tablespoonfuls of coffee to one cup of sugar gives a fairly loose icing. Hold back some of the coffee and add it a half-teaspoon at a time, or work in more sifted sugar if it slackens too far.
- Vanilla quantityThe vanilla measurement is incomplete in the original; given the parallel wording of the butter line, a dropped 'one teaspoonful' is the likeliest reading, though less will do.
- YieldSomething under half a cup, enough to glaze one 8-inch layer top or a small loaf cake.
- Use it at onceIt crusts over as it dries. Spread it while still warm and workable, and cover the bowl if you must pause.
Uncooked or "water" icings of this kind spread through American household cookery once finely ground confectioner's sugar became cheap and reliably available in the later nineteenth century; before that, icings generally meant beaten egg white and sugar, cooked or dried in a slow oven. Substituting hot coffee for the usual water or milk is the sort of small economy that suits a book of this kind: the last inch in the breakfast pot, reheated, flavours the cake instead of going down the drain.