About German Chocolate Cake

German chocolate cake, that favorite American layer cake with coconut-pecan frosting, is not—German. And it was not (as is sometimes reported) brought to the American Midwest by German immigrants.

The “German” in the name refers to German’s Sweet Chocolate, named for Englishman Sam German, and now made by Baker’s Chocolate.

The cake was first popular in either Texas or oklahoma. After the recipe was published by a Dallas newspaper in 1957, German chocolate cake swept the country. But the cake had been around before that. One St. Louis woman recalled that she had been given the recipe by her mother-in-law in the late 1920s. During the Great Depression, she had stopped baking it because she couldn’t afford the ingredients and lost the recipe. When it was published, she said it “was like meeting a long-lost friend.”