Coffee Cream Layer Cake

This is a modern version of one of the very first French cream-filled layer cakes. In the early days of elaborate French baking, toward the end of the eighteenth century, French pastry chefs made crème mocca (coffee cream) by whisking sweetened coffee into very soft butter. This simple preparation was cited as the glory of several fancy Parisian pastry shops at the time. Nowadays the cream is made with a more stable and much more delicate meringue base, but the cake remains just as good as