How To Make A Classic German Chocolate Cake

hey sugar geeks today i'm going to show you how to make a traditional german chocolate cake with coconut pecan filling and chocolate buttercream [Music] all right so to start making our german chocolate cake the first thing we need is some german chocolate this is actually not german at all it's just named after the guy samuel german german chocolate cake conveniently we need four ounces which is exactly how much is in this bar so now i'm going to melt this in the microwave until it's just melted not too hot about 30 seconds to start and then 15 second increments so this is mostly melted i've got a couple of big pieces in there still but i don't want to melt this all the way to the point where it's fully melted or i could burn it and you don't want to burn your chocolate so i'm just going to set this aside while i prep the rest of my ingredients all right so while that chocolate is cooling down i'm going to go ahead and whip up my egg whites i'm just going to use a hand mixer because i don't want to dirty my bowl just yet of my stand mixer but you can use whatever mixer you want we're going to whip these egg whites to firm but moist peaks they shouldn't look curdled or dry and crumbly if you want to get the full printable recipe you can get that on sugargeekshow.com the link is in the first comment down below i feel like in this case we should under mix instead of over mixing but see how these are holding their shape but they're still glossy and shiny and not all crumbly i think that's about about right that only took two minutes and i'll go ahead and set those aside before you get all excited about this chocolate cake i should warn you that it actually is not super chocolatey it's kind of like a red velvet cake without the food coloring it's a very light chocolate flavor and in my case i really like it because i don't like super super like over chocolatey flavors but the first time i made it i was kind of surprised like where's the chocolate the real star of this show is the coconut pecan frosting that is my jam so if you don't like coconuts or pecans first of all we can't be friends and second of all probably not the cake for you and if you don't use the coconut pecan frosting it's not a german chocolate cake classic classic here so here's the buttermilk room temperature and i'm going to add vegetable oil which is not part of the original recipe but i feel like is important to making the cake a little bit moister moisture is a word look it up mix that up and then set this aside it's a lot of setting aside some flour baking soda salt just whisk that to incorporate it all throughout the dry ingredients what do you know we're gonna set that aside okay so our chocolate is melted and we're gonna do something really weird we're gonna put our warm water in with the chocolate i know it's crazy i had to like reread my instructions like wait what basically we're making a water ganache now i'm using the classic recipe so i did not change this but if i was going to make this recipe a little bit better i would replace that water with coffee but that's just me coffee just enhances the flavor of chocolate okay so now we have our watery ganache that aside so what's the difference between this german chocolate cake and a chocolate chocolate cake it's the brand of chocolate and the amount of chocolate you taste so like if my chocolate cake the death by chocolate is in the epitome of a super chocolatey rich cake this is on the polar opposite of that it's very light it's almost like a vanilla cake with a tiny bit of chocolate in it like red velvet without the red mix on low and make sure to let everything combine fully before adding in your last egg yolk then go ahead and add in your melted chocolate make sure it's not super hot though you want it to have cooled down to about room temperature then we're going to add in our vanilla and mix till just combined and now we're going to add in flour and buttermilk and alternating 1 3 portions it looks so pretty this doesn't smell like regular chocolate cake either it's like it's like maybe maybe like chocolate milk that makes sense right very very light chocolate flavor okay so now we are going to fold our fluffy egg whites into this mixture i'm going to take one scoop of it add it in there we mix everything in so you can see how light that batter is just smooth it around kind of convenient that we have this little pole in the middle it makes for easy folding this is my uh bosch universal plus mixer with the metal bowl i'll put my affiliate link down there in the description if you're interested in learning more about this bowl okay so the original recipe says to use nine inch pans but i just think that's too big of a cake so i'm doing eight inch pans and they're just gonna be a little bit thicker i'm using my cake goop which is the most amazing pan release you don't have to use parchment or anything so i'm just dividing my batter evenly between the three pans and then i'm going to weigh them because i'm team extra to make sure that i have the exact same amount of batter in each pan so we're going to put these into the oven at 350 degrees but halfway through we're going to rotate our cake pans because when you have a lot of cake pans in the oven the sides of the pan that is closest to the side of the oven the heat bounces off that side and it actually makes that area hotter and that's what like a hot spot is so you want to like rotate your pans so that you don't get one side that's higher than the other you only have to do this if you have three pans in the oven at one time or you could bake them one at a time but who's got time for that so the one in the front is gonna actually bake slower than the one in the back and it's gonna bake faster right there so you want to rotate them um so i have a chocolate on my shirt let's i'll pretend that's not there we're going to go ahead and make the filling while the cake is baking up this actually is super easy and tastes way better than the canned frosting like way better so it's definitely worth making from scratch we're going to go ahead and cook this on medium high ish this is not something that you can walk away from don't be wandering around checking your instagram so if you've ever made pastry cream or like chocolate pudding vanilla pudding all of that that's a custard it's basically just a cream a sweetened cream that's thickened by egg yolks sounds fancy you don't want to ever stop whisking otherwise you'll get like little chunks of cooked eggs in there so i think the first time i made this i was just like i don't really know what i'm doing i don't really know what i'm looking for because the recipe i was following didn't have like super specific instructions and then all of the sudden it started getting thick and got to be like a light brown color and i was like oh and that's how you know it's done i feel like if i put brown butter in here but we're doing the classic recipe we're doing the classic recipe follow my own advice make the original first then tweak except for that oil so this is starting to get thicker it's not yet bubbling or anything this is where you really got to make sure you're really whisking that whole bottom of the pan making little circles so that we don't curdle our eggs all right i'm turning the heat down to medium now that it's bubbling because it's splashing me on my hand so i don't want to like burn myself time always seems like a lot um longer when you're whisking you're like i've been doing this for at least half an hour it's been like two minutes [Music] look at that it's like dolce de leche all right so now we're going to remove this from the heat okay let's finish up this filling all that's left to do is to add in our pecans chopped and our coconut baker's brand of course yes they do make a coconut as well but any type of sweetened flaked coconut will do oh my god you guys that looks so good unless you don't like coconut then you're like that's it that's how you make the coconut pecan filling it's basically a custard dolce de leche with coconuts and pecans i'm going to uh go ahead and put this into a different bowl because i want it to cool down if you leave it in the pan that pan holds onto all of its heat and it will just keep it from cooling down all right our cakes are done you can see they're not much darker than they were when we made the batter it's a very light light like milk chocolate cake i'm really excited to taste this so i'm going to go ahead and wait for these to cool for about 10 minutes in the pan then i'm going to flip them out onto the cooling rack and stick them in the freezer to flash cool them so that we can fill it with our frosting if you were making your cakes like the day before and you didn't want to frost it all in one day because maybe you're not a youtuber and you actually have time to do things slowly you can just wrap these in plastic wrap and put them in the fridge overnight all right how to flip a cake if you're if you're not a seasoned caker you know like i just take the pan and i just slap it onto a cooling rack but if that's too scary for you you just take your cooling rack and put it on top grab with the sides and just turn it over that's a pretty cake so next we're gonna make our chocolate swiss meringue buttercream and for this i'm using more baker's chocolate but you could use cocoa powder other melted chocolate whatever you like so swiss meringue buttercream is basically where you dissolve sugar into the egg whites whip it up to stiff stiff stiff peaks and then you let that cool down and then you whip in butter and chocolate voila chocolate swiss meringue buttercream i think there's some salt and vanilla in there somewhere too details details the reason why i'm making swiss meringue instead of my easy buttercream is because i want to add in the melted chocolate i've done easy buttercream with cocoa powder but i've never done chocolate in that so i'm doing what i know how to do i think he probably could make easy buttercream and add in melted chocolate too though we'll have to test that one out add that to the list if you want to learn how to make my swiss meringue buttercream check out sugargeekshow.com okay so now we actually get to start decorating i'm decorating on top of an eight inch cake board but you could just decorate right on top of a cake plate if that's all you have no problem i'm putting my ugly layer on first this had a little bit of unmixed melted sugar right there fixed everything can be fixed with filling all right so this is one of those times where you want to make the filling really thick it's like a half an inch thick not only is this filling very thick already but um it's kind of like the star of the show so you don't want to like put just teeny tiny skimpy layers of filling filling in there and you have plenty so go go for broke here i'm just kind of scraping all of this filling so it's not going off my edges because i'm not putting a ton of buttercream on this it just is enough to hold the filling in and to cover the outside of the cake so it doesn't dry out because typically a german chocolate cake is not frosted at all you just put the filling inside and stack it up and it's done but hope we don't play that i like i like a little bit of frosting on my cake so i'm going to use almost all of it in between layers and then just save maybe a half cup for the top all right smooth out that filling definitely was a little bit more generous with that bottom layer time to put on the frosting you got to make that noise [Music] i'm just going to put a thin layer of frosting all the way around normally when i'm making cakes like this i'll like chill the cake before putting on the final layer but this cake is actually pretty firm i don't feel like it's too too jiggly i think i'm just going to put the leftover right in the center and then smooth it out because i feel like this is like a total pastry school thing but we were taught that whatever was on the inside you put on the outside when it's just like a baker's cake if there's cherry filling on the inside then you'd have cherries on the outside so that when you're looking at it it's like you know what's in there [Music] [Music] we're going to use a 1m to make the little swirls on top just a little standard star tip just put that in the bag don't need a ton it's almost exactly the perfect amount of frosting you might have a tiny bit left over all right i'm just going to do some little uh swirls and typically you'd put a little maraschino cherry on top but i don't have any so we're just going to do swirls one of these days i'll think of a better way to make dollops okay so now i get to taste this german chocolate cake i'm super interested to see what it tastes like it's got this light color the coconut and pecans oh it's very tender oh it's disgusting oh it's so good it's so moist or not surprisingly it doesn't have a huge chocolate flavor mostly tastes like coconuts and pecans but it's incredibly moist from mixing in those egg whites into the batter it's really giving it that super fluffy texture so in conclusion german chocolate cake nothing to do with germans but everything to do with a delicious cake so i highly recommend 10 out of 10. if you want to see more videos like this one check out the next video and i'll see you guys next week

Channel: Sugar Geek Show

Views: 60,907

Keywords: cake, sugar geek show, tutorial, lizzo marek, german, chocolate, classic, how to make a german chocolate cake, recipe, coconut, german chocolate cake filling, pecan, cake filling, swiss meringue buttercream, chocolate frosting, buttercream, cake decorating, baking hacks, baking, cakes

Id: VVYqo7E0Gz4

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 14 2020