Well, I guess it’s chocolate and cake, but not German.
Which I find as a relief. I’ve never liked it and none of my German relatives, who owned two bakeries, had heard of it when we first ran into it when I was a teenager and people would expect us to serve it.
According to Wiki “Contrary to popular belief, this cake did not originate in Germany. Instead, the name derives from Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate, which was created in 1852 by an Englishman named Samuel German for the Baker’s Chocolate brand. The original recipe for “German’s Chocolate Cake” was sent by a Dallas, Texas homemaker to a local newspaper in 1957. The cake became quite popular and General Foods — which owned the brand at the time — distributed the recipe to other newspapers in the country, and sales of Baker’s Chocolate are said to have increased by as much as 73%. The possessive form (German’s) was dropped in subsequent publications, forming the “German Chocolate Cake” identity we know today”
So now I can freely disown it and not feel guilty of ignoring tradition.
Statements of the form “XYZ is neither X, nor Y, nor Z,” are tempting to make (thank you Mike Myers and Cawfee Tawk). But they often turn out to be not quite true.
GCC is cake by any common definition of the term. It is moist and porous, contains eggs and milk, is made with cake flour, and baked in a cake pan.
As to whether GCC “is” chocolate, despite lacking chocolate icing and being rather light in color compared to (say) devilsfood, I won’t presume to say. But it does contain chocolate - a comparatively small amount, dissolved in boiling water.
To be fair, the OP did retract the “not chocolate or cake” statement in the first sentence.
This was my favorite cake when I was a kid and I always asked for it for my birthday.
And I did learn it was not German in a recent pit thread “I hate Germany” where I tried to credit the Germans with the cake and was immediately corrected. See you can learn things in the Pit, mostly good swears.
For my part, I ruthlessly skim OPs. Even if the header doesn’t tell the whole story, I very often respond only to the header. The beast must post, even though he die.
Yeah, that’s one of my favorite little food factoids. And couple that with the fact that the “Baker’s Chocolate” company wasn’t so named because it was intended for baking, but because the company was founded by a guy named Baker.
I found this out in the early nineties. I promised a friend my typical birthday present–whatever kind of cake (within reason) he wanted. He asked for German chocolate cake.
Easy! I thought. I’d just find a recipe at the library (this was pre-Internet).
Nine cookbooks later, I gave up, telling him that for some reason nobody but nobody had a German chocolate cake recipe. When I finally found out that the term was trademarked, a sad little mystery was solved.