Piece of cake

We saw more than one German Chocolate Cake over the holidays. Now, if you ask me, German Chocolate Cake is all that a cake needs to be. I am not a big fan of chocolate, and German Chocolate Cake uses a kind of chocolate that is marked "mild dark" and that suits me fine. And the icing! So tasty. Now, cake purists will tell you that it's actually a custard, made by low-boiling brown sugar, granulated sugar, butter, egg yolks, and evaporated milk, and adding vanilla, pecans, and coconut to make a gooey slathering for the cake.

As long as I'm sharing my thoughts, I think there is nothing that can't be made better by adding coconut to it.

Something else we need to talk about...German Chocolate Cake has nothing to do with Germany at all. You can go to Bermuda and tell them how much you love wearing Bermuda shorts in summer, and the people of Merrie Olde England are delighted to hear that you toast one of their muffins every morning, and I once told a woman in Winnipeg, Manitoba, that any bacon she ate was automatically Canadian bacon. 

But you can't walk up to Hans, the baker, in Munich and tell him how much you love his German Chocolate Cake without him calling you a dummkopf. That's because we call it "German" Chocolate Cake after one Sam German, a baker who developed that sweet baking chocolate for the Baker's Chocolate Company in 1852. 

And old Sam was long gone by 1957, for sure. That's when a woman in Dallas, identified as "Mrs George Clay" in the inane sexist terminology of the day, sent a recipe to the Dallas Morning News for its popular "Recipe Of The Day" column for what she called "German's Chocolate Cake." General Foods, the multinational conglomerate which was absorbed by Kraft Foods in 1989, owned the Baker's brand at the time, and they about broke their necks to pass the recipe on to other papers all over the country.  Within a year, sales of Baker's German's Chocolate were up by 73%, and while none of that money accrued to either Mr or Mrs Clay, we all knew they ate some tasty cakes. 

And they changed the name of the chocolate to Baker's German Chocolate, which is where the old rumor about it being German started.

Two more things I have to say before I go start working off the holiday cakes...you can't take a regular chocolate cake and cover it with coconut-pecan icing and call it German Chocolate Cake. That won't do.

And where did this thing of calling Ralph O'Hoolahan's wife "Mrs Ralph O'Hoolahan" get started? Everyone knows her name is Mitzi...Mrs Mitzi O'Hoolahan! You wouldn't call him "Mr Mitzi O'Hoolahan," would you?

And is it ok to bring a Devil's Food Cake to a church supper?