German Chocolate Cake

I made German chocolate cake for the first time when I was about 11 or 12, for a friend who had just officially "become a woman" and requested German chocolate cake to celebrate. I am pretty sure I hadn't eaten it before that day. I remember the cake I made being good, but full of super sweet coconut flavor. Until this past Thanksgiving, I was never interested enough to make it again.

In one of those strange and happy coincidences that sometimes happens with the Baked Sunday Morning recipe schedule, I'd been looking ahead at the upcoming recipes from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking when ME mentioned that she'd like to celebrate John's birthday at Thanksgiving with his favorite cake; German chocolate cake. Around the same time, Caleb's mom mentioned that Dallas' favorite cake is German chocolate cake, and wouldn't it be nice if we had some over the winter holidays to celebrate both of their birthdays.

I've made this cake twice now, and both times it's turned out quite well, but I certainly have some advice for success (which might not be necessary, unless you're like me and skew towards lazy about cake making sometimes).

Cake success tips

First of all, I converted all the volume measurements to weights, using standard charts. These are all quite similar, regardless of source, except when it comes to all-purpose flour. For my purposes, I use 135 grams as the equivalent of 1 cup of AP flour. I find everything bakes much more consistently using grams and am happy that the later BAKED cookbooks include weight-based measurements. (It's crazy to think that as recently as 6 years ago, I thought weighing out things was mostly a waste of time.)

Prepping this German chocolate cake is quite simple, however it is very important that your coffee is actually hot and that you don't melt the chocolate for the batter too early. The second time I made this cake, I was lazy (see above). We had some leftover cold coffee, and I thought I'd be clever and melt the chocolate upfront so I didn't need to wait on it later. What happened was that my batter didn't become cohesive, and the cold melted chocolate hardened even more on contact with the cold batter, meaning that my batter was not a uniform mix when I went to bake it, but full of shards of chocolate. These shards only "melted" into the batter a little during baking; the cakes didn't rise as much as they did when I made the cake properly (with hot coffee and still warm melted chocolate), and the texture wasn't quite as nice as it should be either. Let my mistakes be a lesson to you.

Making the BAKED German chocolate cake at ME's, I weighted out the batter evenly across all three 8-inch pans (each was roughly 630 grams), then baked the cake for 30 minutes in her convection oven before checking. Two of the cakes were absolutely done, and the third cake I pulled out as well, but when it came time to turn the cakes out ... that third cake was still almost entirely batter on the inside. I put it back in the oven for another ~20 minutes or so (from cold), and fortunately I was about to mostly save the cake. This same thing happened the second time I made this cake, at my parents house, where I also weighted out the batter evenly, but into two regular 9-inch pans and one 9-inch springform pan.... this time, it was one of the regular pans that didn't cook consistently, but I caught it right away and put it back in for another few minutes.

Since Caleb has complained before about the unappealing texture of raw coconut flakes in the icing on a typical German chocolate cake, I opted to toast all the coconut in the frosting (on both occasions). Caleb had zero complaints about the texture (in fact, he liked it), and neither did any of the German chocolate cake lovers complain about the absence of the raw coconut flakes.

After toasting the coconut flakes and the pecans (and then chopping the pecans), you make a custard for the "icing" with egg yolks, evaporated milk, sugar, vanilla extract, and butter. The first time I made this, I didn't stir well enough, and my egg yolks totally cooked. I strained the custard as best I could, and then used that hot custard to temper 3 new egg yolks, pouring about ⅓ of the custard into the whisked egg yolks as I continued whisking, then pouring the tempered yolks into the custard. After adding the toasted coconut and chopped pecans, I wound up with about 3 cups worth of icing. The second time I made the icing, I brought the evaporated milk-butter-sugar mixture to just below a boil, tempered the egg yolks, then proceed with cooking the custard. This seemed to yield a lot less custard than I had the first time around, and I'm not entirely sure why... I would have liked a higher caramel custard to coconut & pecan ratio, personally. Next time I make this, I'd probably make 1.5x the amount of custard.

To ganache or not to ganache

In the picture of this cake in the book, there's a decorative border of chocolate neatly piped around the edges. ME and I decided to make the chocolate ganache indicated in the notes, whipped it until quite fluffy, and layered this on top of the icing on each layer, and then piped some along the borders as well. In my opinion, in this incarnation, the ganache dominated the subtle flavors of the coconut-pecan icing, but if it had just been piped around the borders, it perhaps could compliment without outshining.

The texture of the chocolate cake itself was quite lovely, with a delicate crumb and a deep chocolate flavor. Although German chocolate cake isn't my favorite, or even in my top 10, I'd definitely make this again as a fun, special occasion/party cake.

Head over the Baked Sunday Mornings for the recipe and to see what the other bakers thought of this cake.