German Chocolate Cake Recipe Bakers

Hello Good People! Today we're making one of my all-time favorite cakes, German chocolate cake recipe bakers, named after Samuel German, not the country. It is the most tender, amazing like delicate chocolate cake, it just melts in your mouth, but it's sandwiched between these insanely delicious layers of like a caramel toasted pecan coconut frosting that is just beyond the beyond. Let's get started.

Photo by Emma Jones

First off, we're gonna prep our pans. This is a very tender, delicate, delicious cake, but it can fall apart when it's plopping out especially since it's a big eight-inch pan. You are gonna wanna use a round of parchment paper and just make your own.

Put that pan down, trace around, fold your paper in half, and you're gonna cut just inside of your line. One you don't want a pencil that you're eating, and two it's gonna fit comfortably inside the pan with no wrinkling. There we go, it does not have to be perfect, no one's gonna notice it's really just gonna keep your cake together when it plops out of the pan.

You can use butter and flour or today you can take a shortcut and use baking spray. This stuff is hilarious by the way, it's like a generic brand I think but it's pure oil in here and it says, zero fat, zero calories, blah blah blah, because the serving size is a third of a second burst. This is the serving size. Actually, that was like half a second.

So, be careful when you read labels, like my little hint for you today. All right, spray the inside of the pan, especially the sides, put that parchment paper on there, press down, a little bit more spray. Just repeat that process until you're all done. If you're buttering and flouring your pans, really just flour the sides really well, a little bit of butter to hold parchment paper down and then some more butter on top. It's like coal miner's lung but with baking spray. Okay, there we go.

Ingredients for German Chocolate Cake

Those are all ready. And now we can make that batter. First off, we're gonna get that dry ingredient combo into our large bowl. For the dry ingredients, I'm starting off with 2 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour and that is about 270 grams if you're measuring up like I am. 1/2 teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of baking soda, 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder, in you go, and I'm adding in one tablespoon of cocoa powder.

This is optional, I like a little bit more chocolate in my cake but a German chocolate cake is actually very light chocolate almost like a red velvet cake, very light chocolate from that sweet Baker's German chocolate. All right, one tablespoon in you go. Sift it up. Oh, those lumps, but okay. Now whisk it up. Once everything is combined, set it aside and it's on to the chocolate. 

Nearly all the chocolate flavor from this cake is coming from German's sweet chocolate. Not sponsored but a German chocolate cake is literally, just a chocolate cake made I think in the 1800s to promote this type of chocolate from Baker's chocolate company made by Samuel German.

So that's why it's called a German chocolate cake. I actually get a lot of comments from people saying, this isn't a German cake, why are you calling it German chocolate cake recipe bakers, there's no such thing, but the guy's name was German, there you go.

Four ounces, we're gonna chop it up really finely because I'm gonna melt it with some nice hot coffee, half a cup. Chop, chop, chop, chop. This chocolate is really delicious by the way, I've been nibbling on it. It's like sweet dark chocolate, really nice. Okay, once your chocolate is all chopped up, plop it into like a medium bowl carefully, this is a little awkward. And now half a cup of a hot, hot coffee.

The goal is to not have to use a double boiler or the microwave and then pour that on top, clean the counter up, and set it aside. After it's sat for like maybe 30 seconds or so we can whisk it up, see what's gonna happen. This chocolate actually has like a little bit of a coconut flavor, I don't know if it's just me conditioned to like expect that frosting but it's really interesting, it's a nice flavor. I'm surprised because it's not like a fancy European chocolate company, it's like Baker's chocolate that you get in the supermarket. Okay, that's nice.

Couple lumps are leftover, they're gonna melt and if they don't, I could pop this in the microwave for 30 seconds, and then it'll fix everything. But for now, we can set this aside and get on to the other parts of the batter. 

I'm adding 1 1/4 cups of unsalted room temperature butter into my stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment. We're gonna cream it up and then add our sugar in so let's get it nice and creamy first. That butter looks great to me.

So I have two cups of sugar here but I'm reserving one 1/4 of a cup for later. So, separate that out, and let's drizzle the sugar in until we have a nice fluffy mixture. This looks nice, light, and fluffy to me, let's scrape it down and then move on to the next step.

So what I'm gonna do is separate my eggs on the fly. This will be for the whites. The yolks will go straight in there one at a time while the mixer is running and we're gonna do it gracefully and nothing wrong is gonna happen here. There will be no yolks and my whites, no shells either. Already had a broken yoke, this isn't voting well, boo.

Egg number two, in you go. Number three. Four. I'm gonna add 1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla in right now, it's about 1/2 a tablespoon. Scrape that bowl down, this looks delicious to me. Just checking back with my chocolate ganache mixture it's a very thin ganache, looks like everything melted together. It smells, it smells so good, my gosh.

What is this magical chocolate? I'm gonna pour this in while the mixer is running. All right, let me scrape the top down since that was crazy. I knew I shouldn't have done that but I put it at high anyways. That's called self-sabotage. Now, we can get that, you can see there's a lot of unmixed stuff you're hanging around.

Okay, now let's give it one more mix just to make sure everything's all together, and then we'll start adding our dry mixture in as well. All right, so this is one of those situations where you're gonna add in a little bit of the dry a little bit of the wet, a little bit of the dry, a little bit of the wet, rest of the dry, and you're done.

So, mix it back and forth, roughly in thirds I guess, thirds and halves on low. Don't spill. One cup of buttermilk by the way. A little bit more flour, the rest of the buttermilk. Me, don't spill, buttermilk, spills. All right, last bit of flour, in you go.

Use your spatula and just you know, see what's happening inside of that bowl. There's gonna be some flour up on top, maybe some unmixed parts on the bottom, but don't worry about it because right now it's time do to those egg whites. Into a clean bowl with a clean whisk, we're gonna add those egg whites now, in you go. 

Whisk it up slowly then increase the speed as they get frothy. All right, and as those eggs froth up, we can drizzle our quarter cup of reserved sugar in. And we're gonna take this to the soft peak stage. All right, let's take a look. Whoa, very nice. That is a very perky peak but I'm still calling it soft. Almost done.

Now it's time to take some of this beautiful fluffy egg white mixture, I'm gonna take maybe a cup of it, and just mix it in really fast to lighten this batter a bit, and then we're gonna fold the rest in. This batter is so dreamy, oh my gosh, I would eat this raw. And by would I mean I have several times. Okay, that's good.

Now, take all those egg whites out. And it's time to fold. When we fold, go down, through the bottom, and then cut into the middle. So down, into the middle, down, cut into the middle. You can move the bowl around a bit, but the idea is you're not crushing all those little egg white bubbles. Many of them are getting crushed, but, you know, like those baby sea turtles, some of them are gonna make it.

Okay, and after a little bit of careful folding, we end up with this, this like amazing light, fluffy chocolate batter, it is so heavenly. There we go. I am fully satisfied with the consistency of this batter and now it is gonna be time to divide it evenly. I will be using a scale though because it's hard to tell with this batter, it's not really liquidy so to be a mound, you have to shake it around, so. So I think it's probably gonna be about maybe 400 and change grams each. Let's see, that's 450. Okay more, it's more than 450, probably about 500. Okay, yeah it's about 500 and change per pan.

If you're measuring it out just make sure you zero out your scale before you put the batter in but after the pan on. So you can see all I'm going to do is just kind of tap it around a bit just so it spreads out a little bit before I put it into the oven. It's not the end of the world though, it'll self-level.

I'm adding some baking strips on to get a nice flat cake layer. If you wanna learn more about baking strips, find the article on the homepage for my how to get flat cake layers, it is my most popular article ever because people love flat cakes for stacking, so much easier when they're not domed. Although it cuts down on the snacking for all those cake dams you're gonna cut off.

All right, into the oven, 350 for about half an hour. You might wanna try moving the pans around if your oven has a hot spot, but try and let them sit in the oven without disturbing them because this is like a souffle-like consistency this taste like chocolate mousse raw, so good, right into the oven. Let's make this happen.

Into like a medium saucepan, I'm adding in 1 1/4 cups of packed light brown sugar. I have a quarter teaspoon of salt, you could be a little generous if you want to add a bit more. 1 1/2 sticks of unsalted butter at room temperature.

Why unsalted butter? Because different butter makers have different amounts of salt in their salted butter so we wanna control the salt, in you go. One can of evaporated milk and that is 12 fluid ounces or 354 milliliters. All right, and then the last thing is three egg yolks.

So, reserve those whites, use them for something later. You can make a healthy egg white omelet which is disgusting to atone for your sins after eating all this cake. Two yolks, and three yolks, there we go. Wash your hands.

I'm gonna mix this up a bit, I'm gonna use a French whisk for this. French whisks are narrower and not as bulbous as a regular balloon whisk. That's nice because it can get the corners of your pot and nothing's gonna get burnt in there, everything will be whipped up. Mix it up a little bit then put it on heat and don't forget that splash of vanilla. It's one teaspoon. That's a teaspoon. All right, onto the heat.

I have set this clumpy, lumpy mixture over medium heat. Go ahead and just start stirring it that butter will melt-up, everything's gonna be okay and this is gonna smell so amazing, it's gonna be like a candy facial. Okay, by the by you could have used melted butter in here and it would have been so easy. And why didn't I think of this? I'm changing on the recipe card, use melted butter. There we go.

It's melting up, just stir it continuously. In about five minutes you're gonna have a very thick mixture coming to a boil. Give those pecans a rough chop, they don't need to be fine, you can have big pieces. It's all about that texture. All right, I think we're done. So I'm gonna take it off the heat and add these other ingredients in. Transfer this into a bowl so it cools down a bit faster, this copper pot is very hot. Ingredients for german chocolate cake is so easy.

Right now I'm gonna add my toasted pecans in there. What, so fragrant and last but not least this sweetened shredded coconut, it's Angel Flake Coconut and my mum used to keep this in the freezer and my brother and I would sneak a handful every day in the afternoon, we'd like to take a little bit until there was none left. And my mum would be like, I'm making a German chocolate cake, where's all my coconut? It's in our bellies.

All right, now just mix it up to combine everything and try not to snack too much, it's still pretty hot. This stuff, this stuff is the business. That is so good. If you haven't had German chocolate cake recipe bakers, where have you been? Where have you been?

Eat this, make it, eat it. Set this aside until it is cool enough to spread onto your cooled cake layers that are still in the oven, and you'll have a delicious amazing treat. This cake is so tender but there's a trade-off, it's delicate. And as that cake cools down, all those air bubbles will shrink a little bit as the air condenses, less kinetic energy, blah, blah, blah, things you don't care about, and you know it's gonna collapse a little bit but it is still the most amazing cake. It's not all chemicals, there's a lot of you know from sodium bicarbonate, there are a lot of those egg whites having fluffed it up so a little shrinkage is okay, don't worry about it.

I'm gonna gently invert it onto a wire cooling rack. All these things I don't normally do, okay. And here we go. And then just take the parchment off immediately because it's changing the rate at which the bottom shrinks down but that's very nice, look. This cake, this cake I tell you.

Lift it up, get that parchment paper off quickly because it's gonna change the rate at which the bottom shrinks and you don't want your cake layers to be all you know, trapezoidal with our cross-section, you want nice cylindrical prisms.

Let these cool completely before you assemble, trust me the wait will be worth it. This cake is gonna be so fun to assemble. All I have to do is get an ice cream scooper and scoop on a thick layer of that insane frosting. Scoop it on or just like plop it on with a spoon if you don't have an ice cream scooper and then give it a quick smooth, don't be too careful about it though. Add on the next layer, repeat the process, and then add a final giant as thick as a possible layer of the frosting on top.

You can give it a nice, like a gentle smooth, don't try and make it look too perfect because this is a rustic looking delicious cake. So just smooth it out a little bit and then it's ready to eat. You can store this at room temperature if it's like covered under a cake dome overnight or refrigerate it, bring it back to room temperature and eat the entire thing. I am so ready for this piece. I love this cake.

Just let me get this over with, you have to make this recipe. If you're wondering, well, what kind of cake should I make today? The answer is a German chocolate cake recipe bakers and this is worth all the time. It's also like the only cake recipe where it's a layer cake and I'm not gonna decorate it. Just slather that icing on, don't try and make it look all fancy, it is what it is and it's delicious.

Okay, let's take a bite. Get all that frosting. Like joy, happiness, endorphins. That frosting is intoxicating, even if you hate coconut, you're gonna like this, I just promise you.

I hope you get a chance to make this recipe. You can always get other recipes on kitchenlatte.com. Enjoy and stay safe.