One of my husband’s uncles grew up in the North Beach area of San Francisco.  He said that the bakeries in Little Italy used to make a mocha cake that was mocha-flavored through and through—not just the frosting, but the cake and the frosting too.  It was apparently much more coffee flavored than chocolate flavored.  He’s asked at all of the bakeries there now, and they say they remember that cake too, but don’t know anyone that still makes it.  Any ideas on where I could find a great mocha recipe reminiscent of this, or how I could adapt one of Rose’s recipes?  Thanks!!

Do you know if the cake was a sponge-style or butter cake?

You could syrup a genoise au chocolat with lots of coffee syrup- the chocolate is light enough that it would be easy to make the coffee in the syrup stand out.  Then use Rose’s light whipped mocha ganache, from the coffee cake in Rose’s Heavenly Cakes- the ganache is to die for.  Basically a very similar cake to that one in RHC, but with a chocolate instead of yellow genoise to give you the mocha cake.

Loopy - 27 July 2011 12:37 AM

It was apparently much more coffee flavored than chocolate flavored.

If I were going to try, I’d make Rose’s Devil’s food cake, but use coffee instead of water, and I’d probably throw in a few tablespoons of espresso powder.  If you want less chocolate flavor, you might scale back the cocoa gram for gram with the espresso powder.  (I normally throw in a couple of teaspoons of espresso powder anyway to the cake recipe.)

hmmmm, that sounds kinda good.

Oooh, Charles, that DOES sound good!!!

Both ideas sound good!

Thank you for the ideas!  I will definitely have to experiment on this one.  It’s always hard to try and recreate a cake that is in someone’s memory (because sometimes it seems like the flavor becomes more delicious over the years, at least in our imagination…), but I’m willing to give it a try!