GERMAN chocolate cake looks pretty good for 50 -- the combination of tangy-sweet layers and nutty custard is as irresistible as it was when the recipe was first published in a Texas newspaper back in the Eisenhower era. If it were a Reese's cup or an Oreo, German chocolate cake would be into its 10th reincarnation by now.
But this is one venerable dessert that needs an homage more than a makeover. If you take the same concept, with essentially the same ingredients, you can produce any number of variations with just as much extravagant flavor and texture but with 2.0 attitude.
The cake is one of the great American desserts, despite its name, that comes from the brand of chocolate rather than any homeland. Sam German was the chocolatier who came up with the formula for sweet chocolate that the Baker family sold; the green boxes in the baking aisles of supermarkets today still say "Baker's German's." The name of the genius who first thought of making a cake with the chocolate, and layering it with custard flecked with coconut and pecans, is apparently lost to history.
All that's certain is that the result is essentially a torte that's as American as apple pie.
You can replicate it just by following the recipe on the chocolate box, maybe tweaking it by adding vanilla at the end for maximum impact and using kosher salt for more flavor in both the cake batter and the custard. Substituting heavy cream for the original evaporated milk in the custard produces an airier, better-tasting custard too.
But why stop there? You can easily transform the cake into brownies, pudding, cookies, crepes and other desserts that are German in name only And rather than reinventing the wheel, the simplest way to do that is by adapting recipes for other chocolate wonders, and adding the custard in some form to make the dessert properly over the top.
German's is much sweeter than most chocolate, more like regular chocolate chips, and its effect is comparable to substituting a Dutch process cocoa such as Droste for Hershey's. Depending on the recipe, the sugar should be cut back by one-fourth.
The most obvious makeover is cake into brownies, and one obvious way to do that might be to bake the custard between layers of brownie batter. But an Alice Medrich recipe for bittersweet black bottom pecan praline bars was inspiring -- the topping bakes right into the fudginess. I added coconut to the topping and made the bottom using half a batch of a favorite recipe, Jack Bishop's fudgy double mocha brownies from his little book "Something Sweet."
