Is German Chocolate Cake German? The Man Behind the Name

Samuel German's chocolate

In the 1850s, Samuel German developed a dark baking chocolate with the sugar already mixed in. He made it for Walter Baker and Company of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the maker of Baker's chocolate, which sold it under his name as German's Sweet Chocolate. Saveur and the Dorchester Atheneum both give the year as 1852; other accounts say 1853.

Bakers used it for decades before the cake existed. Pastry chef Nick Malgieri, writing in Saveur, notes that German chocolate pies, custards and puddings were popular from the late 1800s.

A Dallas recipe goes national

In June 1957, The Dallas Morning News ran a reader's recipe in its Recipe of the Day column, credited to Mrs. George Clay, a Dallas homemaker. It was a chocolate layer cake made with German's chocolate and finished with a cooked coconut and pecan frosting. Newspapers around the country reprinted it, and General Foods, which then owned the Baker's brand, pushed it nationally.

Sales of the chocolate reportedly jumped about 73 percent in a year. Within a few years there were frozen versions and boxed mixes, and the chocolate box carried the recipe. A May 1956 recipe for "Summer German Chocolate Cake" in The Irving News Record, near Dallas, came first, so the fair way to put it is that a 1957 Dallas newspaper recipe made it famous. Somewhere in the reprinting the apostrophe fell off, and "German's" started to read like a nationality.

Nothing about it is German

Malgieri points out that German layer cakes are usually filled with whipped cream, jam or both, while coconut and pecans are Southern pantry staples. The bare sides and gooey coconut-pecan custard are pure mid-century American.

Our German chocolate cake follows the recipe the chocolate's maker still prints: three light layers made with sweet baking chocolate and buttermilk, stacked with that cooked frosting.

Germany's real chocolate cake

If you want a chocolate cake from Germany, it is the Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, or Black Forest cake. The Black Forest's tourism board describes chocolate sponge soaked with kirsch, sour cherries and whipped cream, finished with chocolate shavings. Farm women there were already mixing cherries, cream and kirsch into a dessert called Schwarzwälder Crème.

Nobody agrees who first layered it. A confectioner named Josef Keller is said to have made one in 1915, but the tourism board notes his cake had a single layer. Bake our Black Forest cake, then compare them in our Black Forest vs German chocolate cake debate or browse the chocolate cake hub.

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