GERMAN’S CHOCOLATE CAKE
Be sure to read the story after the recipe to see why the apostrophe belongs in the name.
What the original German’s Chocolate Cake well might have looked like when it was invented in 1957. In Dallas. (Photo by Ayesha Firdaus on unsplash.)
Fannie Farmer Cookbook’s German Sweet Chocolate Cake
Makes three 9-inch round layers
Ingredients
4 ounces of Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate
1/2 cup boiling water
1 cup of butter
2 cups of sugar
4 eggs, separated
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour three 9-inch round cake pans. Line the bottom of the pans with buttered wax paper. Melt chocolate in boiling water. Cool. In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add yolks, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Blend in vanilla and chocolate.
Mix the flour with the soda and salt, then add alternatively with buttermilk to the chocolate mixture, beating after each addition until smooth. Fold in beaten egg whites. Pour into the three prepared pans. Bake for 30-35 minutes. Cool in the pans for 5 minutes before turning out one to a rack to cool. Frost only the tops with a frosting, although traditionally coconut-pecan.
Wouldn’t it be grand if a recipe were named after you? Beats a tombstone, I take it.
For dessert, then, some German’s Chocolate Cake. Note the apostrophe.
In the mid-1800s, Samuel “Sammy” German, an American of English descent and a chocolatier working for Baker’s Chocolate Company of Dorchester, Massachusetts, came up with a formula for a bar of sweet dark chocolate to be used solely in baking. It was called (and is so, to this day) Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate. Check the label next you’re at the store.
Baker’s is America’s oldest chocolate-making company, begun in 1790, now owned by the corporation Kraft Heinz.
The recipe for what we nearly always call “German Chocolate Cake” (no apostrophe) isn’t from Germany. It’s from a 1957 recipe by a Mrs. George Clay in the Dallas Morning News that she called “German’s Chocolate Cake.” Because Sammy German is a proper name, Clay properly titled the recipe crediting his last name and using an apostrophe.
Somewhere along the line the apostrophe dropped and generations of American cake eaters (and bakers) came to believe that the origins of the confection were from the country of Germany, not merely from a German, so to speak.
Like cake batter itself, it’s all mixed up. For example, in the 13th edition of the “Fanny Farmer Cookbook,” published in 1990, the recipe for “Sweet German Chocolate Cake” lists as the first required ingredient “4 ounces Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate.” In any case, both the mix and the mix-up are delicious.