Triple layered delight – making the best German Chocolate Cake

Every year for Walt’s birthday I make German Chocolate Cake. The recipe comes from the Iowa State Fair Cookbook from 1985.

I am not going to share the recipe here because it really isn’t my recipe to share. I know that some bloggers do share recipes that are not their own, but I am not comfortable with that.

The recipe is by Avis Wittkoski, from Swan, Iowa. She won 1st place the Frosted German Chocolate Layer Cake category and was selected “Outstanding Cake of the 1985 Iowa State Fair” by General Mills/Softasilk Cake Flour.

She deserves full credit for this recipe as it makes a beautifully light cake. It takes a bit of time to put together and I thought I would cover a few tips for making a good cake.

You can get a recent version of the Iowa Stare Fair cookbook here with recipes from 2018 and 2019.

Preparation

There are some prep steps to get ready to make this cake. I melt the chocolate in boiling water, then let it cool. I get the eggs and butter out of the fridge at the same time so that they can come to room temperature. When you are beating egg whites, you will get better results by letting them warm up first.

While the chocolate is cooling and the butter and eggs are coming to room temperature, the pans can be prepared. The pans are lined with waxed paper. This makes it very easy to get the cake out later.

This recipe has you mixing things together in stages. Butter and sugar are mixed, then the chocolate mixture is added, then the egg yolks. I always separate eggs into a small bowl, one at a time, because well, sometimes, eggs break.

By breaking the eggs in a separate bowl, I didn’t get yolk in with the rest of the egg whites, which would prevent them from beating to a stiff peak.

Dry ingredients are mixed together, then added alternating with buttermilk to the butter, sugar, chocolate, and egg yolk mixture. Stirring things in like this helps make sure you have a very even mixture and incorporates a lot of air into the mixture.

I’ve started adding the flour and buttermilk to the butter/sugar mixture. When it is all done, the result is a creamy blend.

Egg whites

Next, the egg whites must be beaten to stiff peaks. For the best results, make sure the bowl and beaters are very clean and oil free and the egg whites are close to room temperature. You can tell when egg whites are stiff peak if you pull the beaters out and the white stand straight up. The egg whites are then folded into the rest of the batter.

Baking and removing from the pan

The batter is then spread in the pans and baked. When they come out of the oven, it is important to let them sit for about 15 minutes before you try to remove them from the pan. I use a plastic spatula to go around the edges and loosen the cake in the pan. After it is flipped over, you want to wait for the cakes to cool about 5 more minutes before you peel off the waxed paper. Sooner than that, and you might peel off some of the cake with the waxed paper!

Unless the recipe tells you otherwise, make sure the cake is cool before you frost it. This recipe has the typical coconut-pecan frosting found on most German chocolate cake recipes.

Some settling of contents may have occurred!

Traditional recipes can be hard to duplicate exactly. Many early cooks used whatever they had on hand to measure ingredients. It might be a tea cup or it might be a measuring cup. Some old recipes actually say “handfuls.” And liquid measuring cups are not the same as dry measuring cups.

For very precise baking, it is best to measure by weight, not by volume. A pound cake is so named because it traditionally is made with a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of flour, and a pound of eggs.

If you just scoop the flour out of the container, you may get a more densely packed measure. I typically use a spoon to gently put the flour in the cup and then level it off with a knife.

To make it more complicated, you might see “flour, sifted” or “sifted flour” in a recipe. And they don’t mean the same thing! “Flour, Sifted” means measure first then sift. “Sifted Flour” tells you to sift first then measure.