from the Grazing archives: let's talk about German chocolate pound cake

I realized this week that a lot of you weren’t here two years ago, when I first started noodling around with food writing. And this story, about my family’s recipe for German chocolate pound cake, was my first post after repurposing this newsletter from sports to food.

That was almost exactly two years ago. And even though it took me another year to start writing here consistently, that feels momentous. (What is time?) So in honor of pound cake season and Grazing’s two-year anniversary, I pulled this one out of the archives.

The cake is ugly.

It’s a shade somewhere between deep brown and beige, an unglamorous and uniform rectangle. It’s best served after being tightly wrapped in aluminum foil for a day or two, so the presentation is anything but elegant. And once plated, the slices still look relatively mundane: long, narrow, trailing a few crumbs as they’re cut and served.

In my family, we call it German chocolate pound cake — which is exactly what it is: a pound cake whose batter contains copious amounts of German chocolate, the kind in the green box. (My ancestors were nothing if not literal.) I don’t have a clue what makes this particular chocolate German, and in 30 years of eating the cake every Christmas, I’ve never cared to learn. I just know: baking aisle, green box, and lots of it.

My mom, Anne, is a compulsive — and talented — baker, and German chocolate pound cake is her Christmas masterpiece. It’s the one thing in her binder of passed-down family recipes she won’t share with anyone but me.

It is also the best dessert I’ve ever tasted (or smelled), looks be damned.

Somehow, it’s not particularly heavy, which you wouldn’t believe if you knew how much butter gets creamed into oblivion in the batter. It’s sweet but not overwhelming, chocolatey but not too rich. Maybe, then, the genius of the cake is that it isn’t too anything. It’s simply just right, without trappings like sprinkles or icing, chocolate chips or nuts or fruit. 

In fact, the cake’s flashiest feature is its top-turned-bottom, the part that emerges from the oven slightly puffed, a teeny bit cracked and somehow still a bit gooey. For German chocolate pound cake perfection, the hot cake needs to come out when it’s still just the teeniest bit wobbly and immediately be flipped out of its loaf pan onto a sheet of aluminum foil. Voilà, the top is the bottom. The whole thing then gets wrapped in foil, and over the next few hours, some combination of trapped heat and the weight of the rest of the cake works to form a gooey bottom edge, about a quarter of an inch of pure sin.

Anne got the recipe from her maternal grandmother, Margaret Roth, whom she called Mimi. Mimi was born in 1897 in Pfeifer, Kansas, a tiny town in the middle of the middle of nowhere. Pfeifer (pronounced, for some reason, pie-fur) was founded in the 19th century by German immigrants determined to build their own little world in Ellis County, Kansas. They named the town after the one they’d left behind in the old country and built a massive church out there on the plains, an exact replica of the one in the first Pfeifer.

Mimi spoke only German until she went to school. She married a man from her hometown and moved to Kansas City to raise her kids. During Prohibition, bootlegger neighbors tried to set their stash of hooch on fire after law enforcement started poking around, and they exploded Mimi’s family’s house in the process. Her kids got scrapes, but everyone ended up OK. Eventually, her daughter Marge, my grandmother, went east to St. Louis. Mimi stayed behind and made pound cakes.

Every Christmas, she baked and baked for Marge and her family; Marge’s husband had a mighty sweet tooth. But Mimi always celebrated the holiday in Kansas City, so she sent the pound cakes down Interstate 70 in the trunk of a relative’s station wagon, along with homemade doll clothes and flannel pajamas for her six grandchildren.

On the day the cakes were due to arrive, my mom would wait by the door, on lookout. When she was 11, she learned to bake them herself. Mimi died two years later, and Marge never much liked baking — so my mom and my aunt Kitty took over.

I have to imagine I was about the same age when I learned the recipe: how to sift flour and melt chocolate over a double boiler without burning it, the importance of exact measurements. And once I mastered it, I was in luck: no one paid much attention to how much batter I tasted when I was the one baking.

And oh, the batter. Somehow, it’s even better than the finished cake. I would happily contract salmonella devouring an entire batch. There’s just something about the grainy sugar and the way the chocolate tastes before it’s gone in the oven that makes my tastebuds want to faint with joy. Sure, it settles like a rock in my stomach and makes my teeth ache. Who cares?

To me, the batter is the ultimate secret. Because almost no one has the recipe, almost no one has tried it. When I told Anne my plans to write this essay, she texted, “Do not give that recipe out!!!” It sounds extreme. It is extreme. But we make up for our fanaticism, I think, with how liberally we share the cakes. My uncles swarm for them each Christmas. Anne delivers foil-wrapped loaves to all of her friends. Some hide theirs from their kids. Others freeze half for later. And lately, I’ve taken up the habit (or birthright) of baking the cakes en masse. Last weekend, when I told my boyfriend I planned to do four batches — that’s eight cakes — in two days, he didn’t blink. Excessive? Sure. But I don’t know any other way.

I have an oversupply of cakes this year due to scaled-back holiday plans. I’m considering handing some out on the streets of Capitol Hill, and I’ve already put a few in the mail to family and friends. German chocolate pound cake travels great this time of year, wrapped tight and sealed in a Ziploc, chilled in delivery trucks and ready to devour upon arrival.

I guess it’s not so different from that 1960s station wagon loaded down with sweets.

I never met Mimi, and I barely knew my grandma Marge. I’ve never been to Pfeifer, Kansas — but one late-summer afternoon, as I was driving most of my earthly possessions from Denver to Chicago, I pulled off the interstate at the nearest exit on a whim. When else would I pass that way? There wasn’t another car in sight, so I put my car in park in the middle of state route 255, facing south. Pfeifer was too far away to see, 15 miles down the road, so I stared off into the flat and watched the horizon shimmer.

I thought about German chocolate pound cake, and then I flipped a U-turn and kept on driving.