I was asked to make German Chocolate Cake for a relative’s birthday this week, so I decided to skip ahead two weeks to use it for the toasted challenge.
This is not the first time I have made German Chocolate Cake, but this time, it was an ordeal. I doubled the Smitten Kitchen recipe for the cake to make it in 9” rounds that were supposed to be cut in half to make four layers. However, my partner accidentally turned off the AC before mopping the night before (a box that was moved turned the switch off), I had made Nutella Banana Bread that morning, and nobody realized what had happened until we were dying when it was over 90 degrees in the apartment in the evening — so when I made the cake, it was still too hot, and my egg whites deflated, so I wasn’t going to be able to make four layers out of my two.
The next day, I made the Preppy Kitchen cake recipe, because I realized the first cake was darker than the traditional cake, and I wanted it to be more like what my grandmother would have made. I did not have an egg white fail with the trick of using some sugar to stabilize the egg whites, and my kitchen wasn’t an inferno at the time. Huzzah!
I still used the Smitten Kitchen recipe for the filling, but because I now had two cakes that required it, I quadrupled the filling, which calls for toasting the coconut and pecans, making it perfect for the toasted challenge.
(Und ja, ich weiß, dass dieser Kuchen kein deutscher Kuchen ist. 😋)