 Oh, it's Tammy with Collard Valley Cooks. I asked you guys what your favorites were, and so many of you said German chocolate cake. Well, it's a favorite in my family too. I have the best German chocolate cake ever, and we're making it today. Make this when this Christmas. Tell them they're getting the Collard Valley Cook German chocolate cake. You can wait till yours is a little thicker if you want to. That would be easier on you. Always flip your cake upside down when you're icing it like that, so you don't want to ice it right side up. It's nice and flat on the bottom, and that's why you do it that way. Now for German chocolate, you can put a few holes in it, and you could actually do that after it's on there too. Now I'm going to put the runiest in the middle so that it might seep down into the cake. Good thing about making plenty of icing like we did is you get to put plenty on it and get us another layer. And this is pretty runny to do the sides. I may let it thicken a little bit more, and then we'll come back and do the sides. But the good thing about doing it while it's wet, like this in between the layers and on the top, is you can run your holes down in it, and it seeps down into the cake. Okay, I cooked this a little bit more because it wouldn't thicken it up quite like I wanted it to. You can tell on the bottom of this bowl, it's still kind of runny even when it's cool, and it's supposed to be thick. And you can tell by looking at it, it's thick. And it didn't separate or anything. You just got to watch it close. And uh, once it's thick, even if it's hot, you can ice with it. You can see the different consistency of that compared to what I have. Now, what I did earlier is not going to hurt anything because it's soaked all down in the cake layers and it's going to be delicious. So we're going to finish icing it up real quick. I'm actually going to put it top of something because it's hot on the bottom. So I don't want it to get too hot on my counter. All right, let me grab a spatula. Now we're going to start putting it on the sides of the cake. So I'm using a spatula to do the side. And the best way to do it is just put it on there and spread it quick. And if you're going to do it hot like I'm doing it, try not to get burnt. And you can wait until it cools all the way down to ice it. I can just ice a cake. You know, I've been iceing cakes forever. And so I'm not intimidated by a thin icing like a lot of people would be. But that's one reason you do pick it up and ice it over the top of the bowl. When you do a thin icing like this, I have to do my Japanese fruit cake icing the same way. And it's got coconut in it like this. And now you can just sit it on your cake plate. Let's make the top real pretty. This has got a lot of icing on it, y'all. It's going to be really good. Looks really nice. It's going to taste even better. But look how tall it is. If you do make your cake this tall, you got to have a really tall dome. When I make German chocolate ice and I make a lot, we're going to start out with two sticks of butter. We are going to put them in a batter bowl and melt it in the microwave. Now watch it and don't let it get to boiling or anything. Just make sure that it's good and melted. And it's pretty close. Pretty hot. So we're going to add our sugar to it. That'll continue to melt down in there. And I don't like to wait until it's bubbling because you don't want it to scramble your eggs, okay? We're going to add two and two-third cups of sugar, granulated sugar. That's two-thirds. And now we've got to put in four halves. Two and two-thirds. And you do the same amount of milk as you do sugar. Now we're going to go ahead and put in our eggs. One, two. Now I use large eggs or extra large. Either one works. Let me wipe off my counter. So you're going to just whisk these eggs in good. They're nice and fluffy looking. There's one and one-third. Now we've got to do one and one-third again because it's two and two-thirds. And I do double this. If you don't want to make a large recipe, then you can half this. But we like a lot of icing. That's the best part of German chocolate cake is all that yummy icing. So I want you to have enough to ice plenty of it. Maybe even ice the top of some brownies if you want to when you're done. So it's a lot icing. Now we're just going to stir this together. And that's thick down at the bottom. So I've got to be careful and not splatter it. This is that really good vanilla expensive kind. Now at this point it's time to microwave it. And when you microwave this, we're going to start it at three minutes and get it out and whisk it. So it's going to take a minute for that to get hot because there's a lot of it in my batter bowl. The icing and the cake layers in our volume one cookbook because this of course is something that we make a lot for the holidays and couldn't leave this amount of our volume one. German chocolate cake and German chocolate icing. Start to get good and warm. You've got to make sure that sugar gets mixed in there good and melts. So it wants to stay in the bottom of your batter bowl. So you've got to take it out and whisk it. I'm going to put it back in there for a couple of minutes. Now this time when you take it out you can kind of see that it's risen a little puffy around the edges. So I do believe it's starting to, yeah, try to get a little more creamy. And this is the science with this stuff. You can overcook it or it turns curdle but you want to cook it long enough. So I think in one more minute and then it's going to be ready. That's almost done. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put in one half cups of chocolate limes and this bowl and a whole bag of baker's sweetened coconut 14 ounce. I'll pour this over it. All right. Now we're going to pour it over the coconut and the pecans. And as it cools it'll get a little thicker. So like I bought a nine inch board but I'm using an eight inch cake. So I cut it. I laid the pan down on top of this and drew a line. And then I cut it just a little bit larger to hold a little bit of that icing on the edge of the cake once I put it on this board. And I will actually ice the cake elevated over this right here. That's how we'll do it. But we're going to wait just a few minutes. Okay. I cooked this a little bit more because it wouldn't thicken in that quite like I wanted it to. You can tell on the bottom of this bowl it's still kind of runny even when it's cool and it's supposed to be thick. And you can tell by looking at it it's thick. And it didn't separate or anything. You just got to watch it close. And uh what's it's thick? Even if it's hot you can ice with it. You can see the different consistency. We're going to start out combining our dry ingredients. We're going to use two and a half cups of flour. This is a half cup scoop. So we'll take five of these. Remember that my homemade cake mixes have a little more mix than most people's. I use more flour. I got two and a half instead of two. So keep that in mind when you're putting them in pans. Because you're going to have more batter than you would typically have. We're going to use a half teaspoon of salt and a half cup of Hershey's cocoa. This is a quarter cup so it'll be two of these. Brand new box of Hershey's cocoa ready for the holidays. So we're just going to whisk all this together good. And that way when we add these dry ingredients the cocoa is blended into the flour good. All right now we're going to start mixing up our cake. When you mix a cake you always mix up your shortening and butter and then your sugar and then your eggs. So we're going to start with a stick of butter which is a half cup and a half cup of shortening. And your butter should be room temperature. It's a half cup. Half cup of shortening. Going to add two cups of sugar. These are half cup scoops. I'm going to scrape the sides a little. Now I'm going to add three eggs. I'm going to add them one at a time while it's running. I'm going to add a teaspoon of vanilla and I think I'll scrape the sides a little bit better. All right now it calls for a cup of evaporated milk and a half cup of water. We've already got a half cup of water in our measuring cup. So now I'll add evaporated milk to the one-in-one half mark and that will equal one cup of evaporated milk and a half cup of water. Make sure you shake your evaporated milk good. And if you don't have one of these old fashioned openers you should invest in one. You can always go to our website and check out our links for our kitchen items. It's a very affordable all stainless steel so it won't rust. We're going to go up to one-in-one half cups. Okay, we're going to add this milk alternately with our flour. Once you start adding flour to a cake mix it starts to combine with the liquid ingredients and it starts the process of making your cake. You don't need to over beat it. So try to get your flour in there and then don't beat it over two minutes after that. Have your oven preheated and ready to bake. I'm going to scrape the sides or we're going to mix this one more minute. Take my cake pans. I always use three cake pans. When you make one of my homemade cakes if it has two and a half cups of flour you're going to have to use at least three cake pans whether you use an eight inch or a nine inch because it's a lot of batter. Okay, so keep that in mind. Now it won't overflow a regular sheet cake pan 13 by 9 but it will overflow two round cake layers. So I always use baker's joy or some type of spray with flour in it and I like to spray it over the sink because then it don't get all over everything. I do a good job spraying them. Another reason I like to use an eight inch later is because if you have a cake dome and sometimes it'll get too tall for the cake dome unless you get a really tall cake dome. But another thing is it fits on the platter better in case you do want to put a border or something around it so that your dome don't mess it up. If you want to be precise for the holidays you can measure your batter out and I think I'll do that and that way there will be equal sizes. So we'll start with a cup. That's a good thing about making my layers for cake batter is you have enough for the kids to have a bite. Now if you just don't like the raw eggs and it grosses you out of course don't feed it to your kids but we always ate it and I still do. Amy will actually mix up a cake mix with our eggs sometimes just for snack. If all you have is two round layers and you don't want to cook another one then make a few cupcakes at least four. Put them in your cupcake and then put the rest of the batter in two pans. It should take anywhere from about 25 to 30 minutes according to your oven. Mine set at 350 degrees and everybody's just a little different. So just check your layers and make sure they're done in the middle. Do not open the oven for at least 20 minutes. That's the critical time. Never open the oven until it's been at least 20 minutes. All right we're going to place these in here and I'm going to let y'all watch them rise. It's a great idea. Make your layers. Put them in the freezer. Wrap them really good with saran wrap. Put them in the freezer. Actually when you freeze a cake layer it gets moisture for when you ice it and serve it. So it's a good thing to put them in the freezer first. This one's really moist anyway. Some of them are, some of them ain't. You know but this one really is. This is a delicious cake layer. It's very fluffy. So we're going to flip them out. So as soon as you can pick up the pan without burning then you can flip them out. Don't leave them in there too long they'll slip and then they won't come out for you. But I let them cool on parchment on top of cookie racks. And you can see these pans I use are nonstick. They're Chicago metallic and you can put them in the dishwasher. They're dishwasher safe I'm pretty sure. Just check and make sure when you if you get them. But I love them. I put them in the dishwasher all the time. This thing is really tall. I need to clean off the edge of my spatula. Okay here we go. This is a big piece of cake and it's fresh. So it hasn't been refrigerated or anything yet. So keep that in mind when it hits the plate. You can see all this goo in the middle. It looks nice and moist. It's light and fluffy. That is a delicious German chocolate cake. Y'all it is really good. Family likes German chocolate cake homemade. Make this when this Christmas. Tell them they're getting the collard valley cook. German chocolate cake. Thanks for watching collard valley cooks where we cook. Like mama did. Bye y'all. Love ya.