There it is! My first cake of the year, German Chocolate Cake. As I stated in a previous post, I am going to bake a cake every month this year. I decided to start with a challenging one. Before tackling this behemoth, I read up on it. Did you know that German Chocolate Cake is not German? I did not. According to Wikipedia, the world’s most trusty source of information:

“Its roots can be traced back to 1852 when American Sam German developed a brand of dark baking chocolate for the American Baker’s Chocolate Company. The product, Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate, was named in honor of him. In 1957, the original recipe for “German’s Chocolate Cake” was sent by a Dallas, Texas, homemaker to a local newspaper. This recipe used the baking chocolate introduced 105 years prior and became quite popular.”

So there you have it. Not German at all. After these startling facts were revealed, I went on a search for the perfect recipe. I don’t know about youse, but I enjoy a moist cake that has a good ratio of icing to cake to filling. I ended up going with a David Lebovitz recipe which I tweeked a little to make it more traditional.

As you can see, this cake has an assload of ingredients, even with the few I omitted. Instead of the 2 kinds of chocolate in the DL cake part, I opted to use the original “German’s” chocolate. Hello! The freakin cake is named after his chocolate. Show the man some respect.

All in all, I think this dumbass cake cost about $25 between the 3+ sticks of butter, pecans (why are they so expensive?), coconut, buttermilk (why do they only sell quarts of that?), chocolate and other miscellany (some of which I already had). I got everything out, prepared my cake pans and preheated the oven. The making of the cake batter was quite a work out. You had to melt chocolate, beat egg whites to a stiff peak, fold them in, mix everything…my arm was hurtin’. Here is how everything turned out.

While the cakes were in the oven, I made the filling and icing. I decided to leave out the rum syrup from the DL recipe. I figured, this cake already has 2 1/4 cups of sugar, 3+ sticks of butter and corn syrup in it, does it really need rum syrup too? No. Lebovitz must be a fat moo…haha.

All the components had to cool completely before assembly so I kitty proofed them and went to sleep. This morning I woke up determined to finish the cake. I proceeded to carefully cut them in half, spreading the coconut pecan filling between each layer. After they were all stacked nicely (four layers!), I spread the chocolate icing on the sides as evenly as I could and piped a half ass design around the edge. Then I used my decorating comb to make ridges in the side and that was it. First cake of the year, didn’t turn out too bad. It is moist, it stayed whole and it tastes pretty damn good.