Chocolate Cake - Page 2
One of the most popular types of chocolate cake is the incredibly sweet, fanciful German chocolate cake. There is a common misconception stating that German chocolate cake, a delightful, moist and rich confection made with sweet baking chocolate, pecans and coconut, arrived in the American Midwest courtesy of German immigrants. The true origin of chocolate cake actually stems from an American. In 1852, Sam German, working for Baker’s Chocolate Company, created a mild dark chocolate baking bar. Baker’s named the confection in his honor, calling it “Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate.” Over the following years, the apostrophe and the ‘s’ dropped from the name in popular usage, leaving simply “Baker’s German Sweet Chocolate” - hence perpetuating the myth of the treat’s foreign origin. 1957 was the year of the first published recipe for “German’s Chocolate Cake”, appearing in a Dallas newspaper courtesy of a Texas homemaker. The recipe, along with several mouth-watering photographs of the delicious treat, rapidly gained popularity across the country, and the true connotations of the word “German” in German chocolate cake were lost in the frenzy. Today, many believe this delectable chocolate cake is German in origin.
Another wildly popular variety of chocolate cake is the tempting Devil’s Food Cake. This cake also goes by several aliases: Red Velvet Cake, Red Devil’s Cake, Waldorf Astoria Cake, and Hundred Dollar Cake, to name a few. Devil’s Food is a wonderfully mild and moist chocolate cake with a rather unusual property: the cake itself is a startling shade of dark red. Traditionally, Devil’s Food cake is served with white frosting to complement its rich color. The origins of Devil’s Food cake can be traced to the southern states, where originally it was made from beets and cocoa - hence the dark red color. Eventually, recipes for Devil’s Food chocolate cake phased out beets and instead substituted red dye to obtain that rich coloring so many enjoyed. Devil’s Food cake enjoyed a heyday of popularity during the early 1900’s, when the recipe first appeared in Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book and soon spread to cookbooks across America.
