Rich German Chocolate Cake Recipe | Gemma's Bigger Bolder Baking

Hi Bold Bakers! A German chocolate cake, ironically, is a classic American cake. It is rich dark chocolate with a filling of pecans and coconut and fudge frosting on the outside. It is a fantastic recipe for Valentine's Day. Also today is bonus video day thanks to my partnership with GoodCook. So after this video, I want you to go over to the GoodCook channel and watch how you can make a no-bake white chocolate and raspberry pie. Now as always, the recipe for this can be found on BiggerBolderBaking.com and make sure you keep an eye on my website, I've got tons of recipes over there. Okay, let's get started with our very first step. So here I have some bittersweet chocolate. You want something around 70% cocoa solids. It's really great for baking with. So add that into your bowl. And then next we're just going to pour in a little bit of water. This helps the chocolate melt. All you want to do is pop this guy into the microwave until your chocolate melts. You can also do this step over a bain-marie. So there you go, my chocolate only took two minutes to melt. Now I'm going to set this guy aside. There are a few steps to this cake, so we're going to take it one at a time. It might seem like a lot, but honestly, once you taste this with all the different layers, it's absolutely incredible. So I brought in my kitchen mixer because this is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting. So here I have some egg whites. Now we have the egg yolks, but they're separated and we're going to add those in later. I'm going to add this into my bowl. And then all you want to do is just turn your machine on to like a medium-high and let these whip up until stiff peaks form. So here's a good baking tip. When your eggs are at room temperature, they're going to whip up so much better. So leave them out before you start to make your cake. So there you have it. They're only going to take around three to four minutes on high speed. Now all you want to do is just transfer your egg whites into a nice clean bowl. So that's step two. I'm going to set my egg whites over to the side. We're going to use them in just a minute. What I'm going to do now is wipe out this bowl and then we're going to mix up the rest of our ingredients. So into your bowl, add in your room temperature butter. Turn your machine on to a medium-high speed again and we're just going to let the butter cream before we add in the sugar. When it's looking nice and loose and pale like this, we're slowly going to stream in the sugar. Doing this step a little bit slower and taking that little bit of extra time really builds a fantastic foundation for the base of your cake. Okay, this is doing its thing over here. I'm just going to ignore it for a minute and we're just going to mix together our dry ingredients. So add in some flour, baking powder, baking soda, and a little salt. It's always a good baking rule just to mix up your dry ingredients before you add them into the rest of your mix so you don't end up over-mixing your cake or your cookies or whatever you're making. Everything is nice and combined, so let's go back into the machine. Here I have the yolks that we separated from our eggs earlier. We're going to add those in, followed by a little bit of vanilla extract because I love vanilla extract. Next up is the star of the show, our melted chocolate. The reason that you melt this early on is because it's nice and cool now so it's really good to add into the rest of our ingredients. So just pour that in. Okay so once your chocolate is in there, we're going to go in with a little bit of our flour and some of our buttermilk. At this point you might want to turn the machine down to a medium-low. And once that's combined, add in the rest of your flour and the last bit of your buttermilk. You kind of do this in two additions. Now you know my rule about over-mixing flour so we're going to turn this off, and the very very last thing we're going to do is fold in our egg whites. So as you can see, I'm using a thin metal spoon to fold in my egg whites. Now I always do this, I was classically trained, and this is the way that you should do it so you don't knock out all that lovely air that you created. So something with a nice thin edge is perfect. I know we've gone through a lot of steps but adding in those egg whites will really make a difference and lift your cake, it just makes it really light. Okay perfect, this is our cake done, now let's get it into the tins. So here I have two 9-inch GoodCook cake pans. I have around five of these, I use them all the time, they're really really useful, also if you watch the next video you're also going to need it for that recipe. Make sure you get yourself some of these and I'm going to put the link on my website of where you can buy them. Divide your cake batter between your two tins as evenly as you can. And then with a spatula, just level about on top. Sometimes I also like to give them a little bit of a shake to get them really even. Okay these are looking good, now let's get them into the oven. Bake your cake off at 350°F or 180°C for roughly 40-45 minutes. While that guy is in the oven, we're going to make our filling. So here I have a GoodCook 2-quart saucepan, a nice little sized pot. Into this I'm going to add in some evaporated milk, butter, sugar, and egg yolks. Then I'm going to turn the heat on to like a medium-low heat, and I'm going to go in with my spatula and continue stirring until this thickens up. So because there's eggs in here, it's kind of like a custard, so make sure you don't walk away from this and let it simmer by itself. You always want to be stirring to stop those eggs from overcooking. So we just want this mix to get really warm, we don't want bubbles to start forming on the surface, because we want to be careful of our eggs. So once it gets nice and thick, just like this, that's going to take you in and around 10 minutes on kind of a medium-low heat. Okay, perfect. Now what we're going to do is turn off the heat, and into this we're going to add in some toasted pecans, shredded coconut, and some vanilla extract. Give those a stir together, and then once it's well combined, set it aside to cool down completely. So here's our cakes fresh out of the oven, they smell amazing. So you can tell when they're baked because you can see they pulled away from the edge of the tin, that's what you're looking for. Also, if you press down on top, it's firm underneath your finger. I'm going to set these aside, let them cool down, and then we're going to decorate our cake. So once your cake is fully cooled, turn it out of the tin, and let's start to assemble it. First things first, we have our coconut pecan filling, and this is going to be the center of our cake. We're just going to put a nice big spoonful in the middle, and then just give it a nice spread out. This is a pretty easy cake to decorate. So just in case you're wondering, this is a really big cake, and it's going to feed a lot of people, but if you wanted to make this recipe into three 6-inch cakes, that would work really well, and you'd also get that lovely height. So once you have your filling on there, go ahead and lay on your second piece of cake, with the flat side facing up. This just gives you a lovely even surface to decorate on. I already know just by touching this cake and the look of it, that it's going to be really incredible. I know it took a lot of steps, but I really think it's going to be worth it. So here I have my chocolate buttercream frosting recipe, you've seen me make this before, and I'm going to just decorate my cake all over with this frosting. A nice layer, get it as even as you possibly can. So for this cake, I'm not actually doing a crumb coat, but you can if you want to. Just spread it all over the top, as evenly as you can, and then down the sides. You want to make sure when you go to decorate your cake that the filling isn't coming out, that you keep it inside, because you don't want that mixing up with your frosting. So if you're nervous about frosting, you can always just use the coconut filling to decorate it and leave it naked, because you will see a lot of people do that. So our cake is looking pretty good, I've saved around a third of the filling to put on the top of the cake, and just spread it almost to the edge. So I had a little bit of leftover frosting, so I'm going to pipe some rosettes on the top, just to kind of finish it off and make it look very professional. Rosettes might be a little bit old school, but I really think they make this cake look so pretty. Just look how gorgeous this cake is, it's probably going to feed around 14 people. This is absolutely gorgeous, but I know that all the good stuff is on the inside. So let's cut a big slice. So just look at that, I know this is one of our more labor-intensive cakes, but just look at how amazing that is, all the different layers, and that cake, that is some good cake right there. So I worked pretty hard making this, and I'm dying to try the cake. People are crazy about this cake, coconut and chocolate are like best friends in this cake. German, American, whatever it is, absolutely delicious. So the fun doesn't stop here, you still have a bonus video to go watch over on the GoodCook channel. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you back here really soon for more Bigger Bolder Baking.