German chocolate cake: No, it didn’t originate in Germany 

All of you love gorging on chocolate cakes. After all, they are the stars of many occasions starting from birthday celebrations to wedding anniversaries. There are multiple varieties of chocolate cakes all over the world. Well, one of the most popular among them is the German Chocolate Cake, a sweet treat that never originated in the country associated with its name. Okay, so where did this delicious, layered chocolate cake with pecan filling, custard, coconut frosting and Maraschino cherries garnish come from? Well, let us dig deeper into the origin story of this dessert trace its journey to popularity. 

The brainchild of Samuel German 
In 1852, an English-American Texas-based baker named Samuel German developed a kind of baking called dark baking chocolate (with cocoa content more than 75 percent). Prior to this, people all around the world used sweet baking chocolate (with cocoa content less than 50 per cent). There were two reasons behind it. First, dark chocolate was only popular among the Belgians and the Swiss where it was found and second, it was more expensive. However, Samuel German soon realised that it wasn’t really a chocolate cake unless it was really chocolatey in nature.  

With this in mind, German pioneered the Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate and set up his baking company Baker’s Chocolate Company. The name was a misnomer but German initially wasn’t confident enough to drop the ‘sweet’ part, in case people didn’t buy it. But as it turns out, his recipe was an overnight hit and locals renamed it as German’s Chocolate Cake to honour the baker. Strangely, the popular dessert never really spread beyond Texas until 1957. 

German Chocolate Cake and the story of apostrophe  
Okay, so what happened in 1957? Well, a Texas-based homemaker named Mrs. George Clay got a chance to feature in The Dallas Morning News’ “Recipe of the Day” section. Guess which recipe she published? That of German’s Chocolate Cake. In fact, she didn’t even take credit for it and instead owed it to her state’s favourite baker Samuel “Sam” German. Wait, that’s not all. Turns out, the editor of the newspaper thought that the apostrophe s was a mistake and got rid of it. This is how it became German Chocolate Cake. 

Now, even though many of the viewers didn’t realise that the recipe belonged to a specific brand, the Baker’s Chocolate Company, and not the country Germany, the brand sure took note of it. In fact, they decided to use it to their advantage and used the peg to market the cake all across USA.