One of my favorite desserts is German chocolate cake: a
layered milk chocolate cake filled and topped with coconut-pecan frosting. (Have you
ever noticed when people are asked about their favorite cake, they describe the
frosting? Maybe cake, after all, is only a means to convey frosting.) I’d always assumed German chocolate cake is so named because
it came from Germany. It’s actually from Dallas. In 1957, a homemaker named Mrs.
George Clay crafted the recipe using a baker’s chocolate developed in 1853 by
Samuel German. She called her cake “German’s Chocolate Cake.” Her creation appeared as the recipe of the day in the Dallas Morning News. General Foods,
which owned the brand of chocolate in question, submitted the recipe to several
other publications across the country, and sales of their baker’s chocolate
rose by 73%. At some point, the apostrophe in German’s Chocolate Cake was lost.
Maybe we should call it Texan Chocolate Cake.
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