Thursday, June 6, 2013

German Chocolate Cake Recipe




German Chocolate Birthday Cake!

So, it's been WAY too long since I've posted on here! Been a bit busy. I made this cake and had a few requests for the recipe. And it's really too yummy not to share! So I thought, "What better place to post my cake recipe than on my cake blog??" So, here it is.



German Chocolate Cake 10 to 12 servings


Ingredients



Cake-
4 oz. Baker’s German Chocolate – chopped

6 tablespoons water – boiling hot
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1¼ cup + ¼ cup granulated sugar, divided
4 eggs, yolks and whites separated
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract


Coconut/Pecan Filling-
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup granulated sugar
3 egg yolks
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup pecans, toasted* and finely chopped
1 1/3 cups sweetened coconut, toasted*

            *I just toasted the pecans and coconut over medium heat in a sauce pan on my stove. It took just a few minutes. Just keep stirring until they brown up a bit, then place them on a paper towel to cool.


Rum Flavored Syrup-
2/3 cup water
½ cup granulated sugar
2 tsp imitation rum extract


Chocolate Ganache Icing-
8 ounces semisweet chocolate - chopped
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup heavy cream


Directions-


1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease two 9-inch cake pans, then (I neglected to do this, thinking my amazing “Joy of Baking” cooking spray would be adequate. It wasn’t!) LINE THE BOTTOM OF THE PANS WITH ROUNDS OF PARCHMENT PAPER! Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt; set aside.


2. Melt the 4 oz. Bakers German Chocolate with the 6 TBS of boiling water in a small bowl. Stir until smooth, then set aside to cool to room temperature. 


3. Sift together 1 ¼ C sugar, 2 C cake flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp baking soda and ½ tsp salt.


4. In a small bowl, combine 4 egg yolks, 1 tsp vanilla and ¼ of the cooled chocolate. 


5. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites on medium-high speed until they hold soft peaks. Slowly add the ¼ C of sugar and beat until they form stiff, glossy peaks.


6. In the mixing bowl, add the sifted dry ingredients, 1 C butter, remaining cooled chocolate, and 1 C buttermilk. Mix on low until dry ingredients are all wet, then beat on medium speed (for stand mixer, high speed if using a handheld mixer) for 1 ½ minutes. Scrape down the sides and add ¹/of the egg mixture. Beat in on medium speed for 30 seconds. Scrape down and repeat twice more with the remaining ²/ of the egg mixture.


7. Using a rubber spatula, fold in the egg whites. Mix just until the egg whites are completely incorporated.


8. Divide the batter into the 2 prepared cake pans (only fill your pans about half way, more than that and the cake will spill out of your pan), smooth the tops, and bake for about 40-45 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool the cake layers completely in the pans. 


Coconut/Pecan Filling- Stir together 1 C heavy cream, 1 C sugar and 3 egg yolks in a medium saucepan. Put the 6 TBS butter, ½ tsp salt, 1 C pecans and 1 ¹/ C coconut in a large bowl and set aside. Heat the cream mixture and cook, stirring constantly (scraping the bottom of the pan as you stir) until the mixture begins to thicken and coats the back of a spoon. Pour the hot custard immediately into the pecan-coconut mixture and stir until the butter is melted. Cool to room temperature.


Rum Flavored Syrup- In a small saucepan, heat the water and sugar, stirring occasionally, until the sugar has melted. Remove from heat and stir in the rum extract.


Chocolate Ganache Icing-Place 8 oz. semisweet chocolate, 2 TBS corn syrup and 3 TBS butter in a medium bowl. Heat the cream in a small saucepan over medium heat until it starts to boil. Remove from heat and pour over the chocolate. Let it sit for one minute, then stir until smooth. Cool to room temperature.


*Once the filling and icing are both cooled to room temperature, put them in the fridge for 1 hour.


Cake Layers- Cut the two cakes in half so you have 4 cakes. Brush the tops of the cakes with the rum syrup. Layer the cakes, using ¼ of the pecan/coconut filling between each layer. Top with the remaining filling. Frost the sides of the cake with the chocolate icing. I found it was easiest to use a large wooden spoon. Scoop up the icing and starting at the bottom of the cake, spread the icing up to the top. You can pipe a fancy border around the top if you have time. I didn’t, so I just piled the icing a little thicker over the lip of the cake to make a border around the filling on top of the cake. It still looked great, even if it wasn’t fancy :)


You can serve it right away, but it holds together a bit better if you can refrigerate it for an hour or two before you cut it.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

A Lot Of Catch Up!

So I have SEVERAL projects to really blog about! So I'll just do a quick show and tell of a few of the projects now and maybe do a more in depth blog for some of these projects later!



This is my little brother's birthday cake. He said he wanted a chocolate fudge caramel cake. I used the most dense chocolate cake recipe I had and then filled in between the layers with homemade caramel... but I cooked the caramel to the hard ball stage in the cooking process, so it wasn't soft like I'd hope. Cutting into it was a chore! But I'm told it was pretty good in spite of the hard toffee... Next time I'll try not to over cook the toffee though!! Living and learning...


This was a strawberry-citrus cake. I adapted a butter pound cake recipe that I love to use for this cake. I added zest from lemons, limes and oranges. Then I smothered the cake in a citrus glaze and topped it with strawberries!! I think fruits are the best decorations. This cake was very refreshing and possibly my most favorite cake! It was also very sweet because of the glaze, so a sweet tooth may be required on this one!




I designed this wedding cake for my friend's, Bryant and Liz. It was sooo much fun to work on. I painted the scroll work on with piping gel and a stencil I created based on some sample pictures Liz showed me.




Over 15 hours!!! I got VERY involved with this cake. I did a sample cake for my neices so I thought I had a pretty good idea of how long this would take... the sample cake I did for my neices was about 1/3 the size of this cake and did not have 1/2 the decorations... a fact I did not factor in when I started this cake! LoL It is a rice krispies treat base (made with strawberry marshmellows and Cupcake Pebbles Cereal) and then I hand painted the towers (plastic pieces from a castle cake kit) with piping gel, and rolled them in sugar A similar method was used for the tower tops, only I used regular icing to coat the tops and then rolled them in sugar crystal sprinkles. The windows and the draw bridge were also in the cake kit, and I piped the decorations on those. Turned out pretty good though!



This cake is probably my most favorite cake I've ever made and I will definitely have a separate blog with this cake! This is the groom's cake for my dearest cousin, Jenn's, wedding. It was the most fun I've ever had designing and building a cake! And with how many prayers of mine were answered in assembling this cake, I'm not sure I can take all the credit for it!
I'm just so happy it turned out well and I didn't end up in a chocolate coma. I was chewing a LOT of gum to keep from "sampling" the cake!!! My kitchen was so heavily perfumed you could practically SEE the chocolate floating through the air... Heavenly... well, heavenly torture actually. But so much fun to make, in spite of the chocolate temptation!

More to come later, but hopefully not TOO much later!
~tinu

Monday, March 22, 2010

A "Krispy" Cake!

For my little sister's birthday, she asked for rice krispies treats and/or brownies... no cake!!! So I had to get creative!

I designed a cake out of rice krispies. It was 3 tiers of regular rice krispies "frosted" with fruity pebbles krispies treats. Delicious. The fruity pebbles complemented the regular rice krispies keeping the fruity from being too overwhelming. I will definately be making these again!





Very simple, but this was a fun cake to make. I made brownies as well and used star shaped cookie cutters to cut them out. Super cute, but I forgot to get pictures of them! Sorry! I'm told they tasted pretty good too.
Until next week!
~tinu

Monday, March 15, 2010

Bundt Cakes

I'm obsessed with bundt cakes. I've been making about 1 bundt a week since I bought my bundt pan last month! So this blog entry is dedicated to the bundt cakes I've been experimenting with.

The first is the Golden Almond Cake. I've probably made 4 of these. My husband likes them so they don't last for very long in my home. And the smell of the almond is just amazing!





Now I haven't gotten to taste this cake, it's a White Chocolate Raspberry Cake. One of my coworkers and my little sister each got a piece and the rest was given away to a neighbor family who was moving. It smell good though and I'm told it tasted good too!



This weekend I went nuts (it was a stressful week and I needed some baking time to cool off!) I made some Pillsbury sweet rolls, Rhodes rolls, and then I got down to the homemade stuff. I made two loaves of bread, banana-nut muffins and a Cordon Rose Banana Bundt Cake.


I discovered that the fastest way to ripen bananas. Freeze them over night! Just make sure you have time to defrost them before you use them. They get kinda mushy so defrost them on a plate!



I made the banana cake without any nuts. It tastes like the banana muffins, but it just felt like something was missing without the nuts. I really like the dense moist texture. I doubled the amount of sour cream used to make it extra moist. Delicious!

~tinu

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Dad's Birthday Cake!

My family celebrated my dad's birthday last week and I got to make the cake!
I make a Chocolate Butter Cake with a thick Milk Chocolate Buttercream.

4 lbs of chocolate went into the frosting. 3 lbs of milk chocolate and then to keep it from being too sweet, I added 1 lb of dark chocolate. Then butter to soften it into a frosting texture. Next time I may use a heavy cream to help soften the chocolate as well.

I melted the chocolate down in a metal bowl set over top of a pot of boiling water. The smell in my kitchen was enough to put you into a chocolate coma... It smelled divine... I had to keep chewing gum to keep myself from taste testing.

The chocolate was so pretty!

This was the cake, pre-frosting.
I may go a bit lighter on the frosting next time.

I used a small decorative scraper to put a decorative side on the cake.


I used a star tip to pipe the edge around the top and bottom of the cake.

And then I was having so much fun and I had some frosting left over, so I did a few more rows around the top. The buttercream got kinda melted so the last two rows looked less like the star tip and more like Hershey's Kisses.

Here is the cake, complete with candles.
A shot of the cross section of the cake.

Plated with icecream. I was told that it was also good with a little milk poured over it.

I'll have to make this again next year when I can try it!
~tinu

Thursday, February 25, 2010

if at first you don't succeed, try, try again... and again... and again...

So I decided to test out a cake from my new cake book!!! (I got it last Friday!) It's a carmel cake and you have to make a batch of carmel to mix into the batter... Well I've had a bad habit of not reading directions completely and assuming I know what I'm doing. Baking has almost cured me of this habit, but it still happens from time to time. And it happened when I made the carmel.
I read the ingredients and added all of the carmel ingredients into the pan (brown sugar, milk and butter). I had finished dissolving the sugar and was starting to let it carmelize when I re-read the directions to get ready for the next step and realized that I should have reserved some of the milk for the next step. First batch of carmel goes down the drain :::sigh:::
I was starting to get impatient with the second batch. I got the ingredients mixed in correctly, but I really didn't want to wait forever for the carmel to get to the "soft ball" stage. I decided that I'd crank up the heat a bit... just help it along... and I burned the second batch. So the second batch of carmel joined the first batch :::sigh:::
I was ready at this point to just settle for burnt carmel. But my husband knew it was going to bug me and he got me motivated to give it one more shot. I just had him keep reminding me to be patient so I wouldn't sneak in and crank up the heat :) You'd really think that just leaving the sugar to boil (you can't stir it or it'll be ruined) would be the easiest part of the baking process, but it's easily the hardest part for me, to just wait! But finally my patience paid off! The 3rd (and final!) batch of carmel came out perfect!!!


dissolving the sugar and melting the butterit starts to curdle up as it begins to boil

waiting... forever!

finally carmelized and the reserved milk has been wisked in

the batter all mixed and ready for cooking!yay! the cake is out of the oven!

it was good plain, but I felt like it needed more
so I decided to carmelize some apples to top it off
butter, milk, brown sugar and apple slices

here is the pretty plated cake I presented to my hubby!
and here's my piece! LoL but I think all mashed up is the best way to eat any cake!

I really like it. I think next time I make it I won't cook the apples as long. They were a little mushy and I think having them still crunchy would even better!

I'm thinking I might try out a coconut cake this weekend. I saw it in my book and I'm dying to try it. I'm not a huge fan of coconut, but the cake looked so pretty! We'll see :)

~tinu

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Birthday Cakes!

Thank you for the pictures Steph!!!

I made these cakes for my niece and nephew's birthdays.


The cake began to sink! But now I've discovered a way to keep the columns from sinking into the cake. I guess I'll attempt a columned cake again soon, see if the straws to help support the columns work out better!

These cakes were easily the most fun I've had with cake decorating!

I did a carmel cake tonight... more on THAT project later!
~tinu