German Chocolate Cake with a twist 

This cake is, as Barney Stinson would say "Legen....wait for it....dary!!! It's Legendary!

The recipe comes from the first cookbook of Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. Baked is the name of the authors Bakery in Brooklyn, New York. This is the same bakery that has been featured on Bobby Flay's Throwdown as well as Oprah's list of favorite things! This particular recipe that I used can be found on page number 83 & 84 of the book along with the Milk Chocolate Frosting Recipe on page 60 and 61. 

Let's talk about the cake. The occasion was David's Birthday Celebration this past Saturday night. His request for a Birthday cake was German Chocolate cake. I knew I had the greatest source for a recipe! I've made various recipes of German Chocolate Cake in my time and this has got to be the most interesting, but excellent, one of them all! The cake itself starts out with an extremely simple batter but the ingredients are kicked up a notch. Instead of using regular Hershey's Cocoa Powder, you use Valrhona or another deep rich cocoa powder (they use Valrhona at the Bakery). For the hot coffee, instead of using just any old strong cup of hot coffee, I made espresso in my beloved Nespresso machine. As I've told you many times in the past, the ingredients you use are a direct reflection of what your finished product will be and taste like. 

I have displayed the ingredients for the cake below. Nothing extremely out of the ordinary as you can see.

Here are the naked cakes chilling out getting down to room temperature. I have never worked with such a fragile cake that has both a dense crumb and is so incredibly moist at the same time. Truly a revelation!

As you can see the ingredients for the Coconut Pecan Filling. I decided to toast both the shredded coconut and pecans on the stovetop as opposed to in the oven which I think was a good idea and worked out very well! You just have to stir constantly to prevent burning instead of toasting. Also, there were three large egg yolks - one of them broke in my hand but made it in the little bowl.  

I always somehow fail to take a picture of a certain step, in this case I didn't take a picture of the rich, coconut, pecan filling that is the best coconut pecan filling I have ever tasted in my life. Some mistakes were made in the composition of the filling, but I don't think that anyone noticed. 

The cake as you can see is now constructed with the 3 beautiful layers of dark chocolate, rich, cake with a pecan filling. 

The next day, I made the milk chocolate frosting of which the ingredients are displayed below. 

I went with all Milk Chocolate, while the recipe does call for half milk chocolate and half bittersweet. I thought we had bittersweet chocolate in the house but did not. 16 oz of chocolate is a lot and while ideally I would have loved to have gone with a higher caliber of chocolate, I just couldn't justify spending roughly $30.00 on chocolate bars for the icing. 

Here is the finished iced product. Unfortunately, as per usual I did have some piping difficulty but it's all about flavor isn't it? I think that I am going to enroll in a cake decorating class at Cake Carousel here in Dallas so that my cakes look a little nicer. 

I got compliments from all of the guests at David's birthday dinner, some of whom said they don't like chocolate cake and/or don't like coconut. I was glad that everyone seemed to enjoy the cake, mostly important the Birthday Boy loved it! 

Unfortunately it didn't slice very cleanly, but I think it might have to do with the sub par knife that the restaurant provided me with to cut the cake. Below is a photo of a slice of cake.

Last but not least, here is a picture of me and my husband at the Birthday celebration! So much fun!