Portfolio: German Chocolate Birthday Cake Roll

Carl is my mother in law's significant other who is a great guy and we love him dearly. For his birthday this year, he requested a German Chocolate cake complete with the toasted pecan icing. On a related side note, did you know that the reason it's called German chocolate is because the fella that created it was named German? Samuel German worked for the Baker's chocolate company and developed the recipe for them using a special formulation of their chocolate. It's sold in grocery stores as Baker's German Chocolate Bars, in the green and brown box. And now you know!

Anyway, now that we are current with our German chocolate cake trivia...

German Chocolate cake is by nature a simple cake which makes it really hard to dress it up. I've seen beautiful pictures of GC cakes before, but they end up adding chocolate icing to the mix, which makes it less of a GC cake in my mind. I did some Googling and stumbled across a recipe for a German Chocolate cake roll and decided to give it a try. It's elegant, captures the classic flavor, and gives a new twist (ha!) to an old fave. And here is how it turned out:


I made three of them just to be safe and then dusted the tips of them with a combo of cocoa powder and powdered sugar. There was so much left over Carl and my MIL were eating it morning noon and night for up to a week later! I now have visions of buche de noels at Christmastime...fa la la la, la, la, LA!

Happy Caking,
Kelly