A family love story that tastes like chocolate

With links to a fabulous discussion on culinary history as family history, and even a few recipes

Feb 14, 2025

I grew up knowing a family story by heart. It was about my grandparents, Howard Semerau and Elvira Stelljes, and a German chocolate cake, and for a long while, I thought it was a story about a recipe.

It wasn’t.

It was — and is — a story about legacy. And it’s the perfect love story to share, especially on Valentine’s Day!

Lucky for me, Barbara at Projectkin gave me the chance to do just that during a recent presentation of Howard & Elvira: Love and the German Chocolate Cake, and afterward the two of us and our live audience talked about the importance of recognizing culinary history as family history, how family stories change over time, the ways food serves as a keeper of family stories and memories, and just how often it really isn’t the food that we cherish, but the people and memories attached to it.

The video of that full presentation runs a little over an hour, and shout out to Barbara for, not only keeping things moving, but also doing such a a great job of adding in links and recipes referenced during the discussion to the final video.

I’ve included a transcript of the story portion of the presentation below, and at the bottom of the page, I’ve included some of the German Chocolate Cake recipes. Enjoy, and I’d love to hear your family food stories in the comments!

Transcript of “Howard & Elvira: Love & The German Chocolate Cake” Video Portion of the Presentation

In the spring of 1932, the people who would become my grandparents, Howard Semerau and Elvira Stelljes, got engaged. To celebrate their betrothal, Elvira baked a German chocolate cake for Howard, who promptly proclaimed it the best cake he’d ever had. Elvira determined then and there that German chocolate cake was Howard’s favorite, and thus a family tradition, and a family story, was born.

For the next 59 years, Grandma baked Grandpa’s favorite cake for every one of his birthdays and every one of their anniversaries, save the three years he was aboard the U.S.S. Ocelot fighting the Japanese. It was, after all, his favorite. If anyone is counting, that’s 116 German chocolate cakes, give or take.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving of 1992. The table has been cleared, the leftovers put away, the dishes washed, and its time plan Grandpa’s and Grandma’s upcoming anniversary party. Extravagant parties were a must-have to my grandma for any celebration ending in a zero, and this next one would be the Big 6-0.

Grandma had already begun work on her formal evening gown and Grandpa’s tuxedo had been serviced, but there were still 100 invitations to hand address, flowers to order and menus to finalize. Gathered as a family, we worked our way down the list: cocktails and mocktails, dips and spreads, finger foods, meats and cheeses.

When we got to deserts, Grandma opened with German chocolate cake. Grandpa cleared his throat, then almost in a whisper said, “No German chocolate cake this year.”

“Of course we’ll have German chocolate cake, Howard,” reminded Grandma. “It’s your favorite,”

There was another long pause. “No, dear,” said Grandpa. “It is not.”

You know how wildlife reacts to the first seconds of a total eclipse, that’s how everyone at the table reacted to Grandpa’s unexpected announcement. Everything got very, very quiet.

After a bit, Grandpa explained. Back in the beginning, he’d been so flattered that the girl he’d fallen in love with would go to the effort of baking such a beautiful cake that he couldn’t bring himself to tell Elvira he didn’t really like chocolate, so he’d eaten it. And, when he’d seen a big smile spread across her face as he ate that cake, he couldn’t help but make a big deal about how delicious it was.

Then Grandma joined in. She loved chocolate but she’d always been a pie person herself. But, when it came time for her to show off her homemaking skills, she’d remembered Howard pointing out a beautiful chocolate cake in the window of the local German bakery they’d passed on one of their walking dates, so she’d decided to recreate that cake.

She practiced making that cake for days, spending most of her Depression-era salary on the ingredients. Grandma was nervous about how the cake turned out, but then Howard’s face had lit up like the Fourth of July, and he’d eaten every last crumb. And he’d told her it was delicious, so right then and there, Grandma had decided she was going to make it for him as often as he liked.

I can still remember how my grandparents laughed about that decades-long misunderstanding.

Share Culinary History is Family History

As an author, genealogist and culinary historian, I always knew I would document and preserve my family’s German chocolate cake story for future generations someday. And that point finally arrived in 2023. My plan was to find Grandma’s recipe, flesh out the story a bit with some research, and maybe bake a cake with my grandkids.

I went into my research with a few basic assumptions – forgetting for a moment that assumption is the mother of all mistakes:

Assumption #1: German chocolate cake is a German recipe. It’s right there in the name.
Assumption #2: Grandma’s recipe for German chocolate cake had been passed down by her German matriarchs or, failing that, she’d gotten it from someone in New Ulm, MN, where she’d grown up. Again, German cake. German family.
Assumption #3: Grandma always used the same recipe every time she made Grandpa’s German chocolate cake.

Samuel German was born December 15, 1802, in Biddeford, England. Not a lot is known about him other than that he ended up in Boston sometime around 1840. And a few years later, he was working as a floor cleaner for Edmund and Walter Baker, owners of Baker Chocolate Company. The story changes with the teller, but at some point, Samuel made the unexpected move from cleaner to food scientist, and in 1852, he formulated an entirely new kind of chocolate – a sugar-infused chocolate which would forever bear his name – and confuse bakers and cooks everywhere – German’s Sweet Chocolate.

This new chocolate was perfect for fine, high-quality cakes, and commercial bakers quickly put it to work baking and selling German’s chocolate cakes.

Over time, however, people got lazy and dropped the apostrophe. German’s Chocolate cake became simply German chocolate cake, and the myth of its Germanic roots was born.

So much for Assumption #1.

Despite this new wrinkle – and the implications it had on my second assumption, I still believed I could trace Grandpa’s favorite cake back to a family baker.

Carla is the daughter of my grandma’s brother, Carl Stelljes, and one of the few members of that side of the family still around. She’s also a skilled genealogist and kinkeeper, so if anyone had Grandma’s family recipe for German chocolate cake, it was Carla.

That's her in the white shirt, with her mom, her brother, and our common great grandma, Maggie.

I called Carla up, explained what I was looking for, and asked for her help.

A few days later, I got an email. Carla did have an old family recipe for German chocolate cake, she wrote, but she was fairly certain it had come from her mother’s side of the family, and not our common Stelljes side. I was surprised, but still pretty confident. I could absolutely find a thread.

Carla’s mom had been a Witt, and her ancestors and my grandpa’s Semerau family had roots in the West Prussian village of Goldau – in fact the two families had intermarried a number of times. And the Witts and my Stelljes family had been neighbors back in New Ulm, meaning Grandma and Carla's mother had grown up together. That recipes may have been traded between the women of the families seemed entirely possible.

Feeling like a big-league hitter who was batting .500, I confidently moved on to my third assumption, that Grandma always used the 1932 recipe every time she made German chocolate cake. I figured the best way to confirm that assumption was to prove there was a Mother-of-All-Recipes out there.

Some people like to knit. Some train for marathons. My dad loved to whittle. Me? I like to dig around in newspaper archives. So, that’s exactly what I did.

I limited my search to recipes published after 1852 and to recipes which contained the phrase ‘German chocolate cake’ – with or without the apostrophe.

And what I found was extraordinary!

In the end, I gathered more than a hundred unique historic recipes for what could – at least technically – be called German chocolate cake – meaning they included the sweet baking chocolate Samuel German had formulated – not that they had roots in Germany.

And, as I looked at the ingredients, the cooking methods and even the flavor profiles, it became pretty clear that the German chocolate cake Grandma made for Grandpa in 1932 was probably not the same cake she made for him in 1942, or 1952 or even 1962. Like their relationship, the recipe – and the cakes Grandma made – had evolved.

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The secret to a German chocolate cake

The summer after first grade was a big one for me in a lot of ways, but mostly because it was the first summer I got to spend a full week by myself with Grandma and Grandpa at their house in Park Rapids, MN. It was the beginning of a summer tradition that continued until I finished college, and the setting for some of my most cherished memories. Grandma taught me how to knit and crotchet, how to play solitaire and fold linen napkins, and how to make Grandpa’s favorite German chocolate cake.

I was too young to know how important that cake was to our family, and – in hindsight, I should have paid more attention – but I do remember the mess I made breaking pecans into pieces with Grandma’s meat hammer, and also the sticky sweetness of the shredded coconut I was tasked with sprinkling over the top of the nearly-finished cake. As it turned out, those two memories were the only two I needed to understand the evolution of Grandma’s German chocolate cake recipe.

There’s some argument about when, where and especially who came up with the recipe which creates what most of us recognize as German chocolate cake today – a decadent, moist chocolate cake with gooey pecan and coconut frosting. The first recipe I found that included both pecans and coconut was published in the Irving (TX) News Record in May of 1956. A month later, a nearly identical recipe appeared in the Kiowa County Star-Review out of Hobart, OK.

By the end of 1956, similar recipes were popping up in newspapers and community cookbooks across the South: German chocolate cake as we know it was very much on the food scene.

In 1958, Mary Jane Bode, editor of the women’s page in the Austin (TX) American-Statesman, gave Lucille Moore, club cook at the Austin Woman’s Club, credit for creating the recipe. Lucille, she said, had been baking and serving up German chocolate cake with pecans and coconut to the club’s members and guests since early 1957. And, it was the club's best-selling dessert.

General Mills, which had purchased Baker’s Chocolate Company decades earlier, had a different origin story when they introduced their recipe for German's Chocolate Cake to the world in January of 1958. According to them, some of their people had heard buzz about a popular new cake recipe that featured coconut and pecans. and their product, Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate. They went to Dallas and tracked the recipe to a woman named Margaret McAllister Clay who had submitted it to a local newspaper.

Sensing that this new recipe had financial promise – today we might say it had the potential to go viral – the big honchos at General Mills quickly acquired the recipe from Margaret, and then turned it over to the company’s test kitchen, where bakers, chemists and food scientists eventually created the famous recipe for German’s chocolate cake which, even today, appears on each package of Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate. And which, it’s entirely likely, was the recipe Grandma and I made together all those years ago.

When I was searching for Grandma’s recipe – when I thought it was just one recipe – I reached out to my sister to see if she had any memories of the German chocolate cake we’d grown up eating and the story it created. She didn’t, she said. Most of her time at our grandparent’s home had been spent with Grandpa out on the river looking for mud turtles, or making something in his woodshop. A tomboy back then, my sister had rarely ventured into Grandma’s kitchen.

A few days later, I got a text message from her: Grandma probably just used a mix.

We all carry around different memories and versions of a family story. To my sister, the story of Grandma’s German chocolate cake was about a cake. And for a long while, I thought it was about a recipe. But it’s not.

For 60 years, Grandma and Grandpa made quiet sacrifices for the people they loved. For each other, for us, for their friends. For strangers. That kind of love—the kind that shows up, year after year, in small, thoughtful ways – is the legacy they left us.

And they left it to us in a story about a cake.

We often think of love stories as grand gestures, but sometimes they’re written on a flour-dusted recipe card or in a cake baked for decades out of sheer devotion.

This Valentine’s Day – heck every day – I encourage all of us to think about the love stories in our own families—not just the big, dramatic moments, but the quiet ones.

The special meals made out of love.
The traditions carried on because they brought someone joy.
The simple acts of devotion that have been passed on in kind across generations.

In my family, one of those love stories started with a young couple and a German chocolate cake. That's where it began, but in retelling their story, my grandparent's legacy of selfless devotion lives on in my life, and the lives of my children and grandchildren.

And, like their love, I know it will endure because they showed us the way.

Some German Chocolate Cake Recipes

Ida Witt Stelljes’ Chocolate Sour Cream Cake

Break 4 eggs into a large cup and fill with sour cream (can use cream with vinegar in it to make the sour cream)
2 c sugar
4 tbsp Cocoa - dissolved in hot water

2 c flour
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
Salt & vanilla
Beat after each addition
Put in greased 9x13 pan or 2 - 8" layer cake pans

Walnut Filling for Chocolate Sour Cream cake 3 egg yolks
1 c. sugar
1 c. cream

Walnuts (can use pecans, but the walnuts give it good flavor)

Also calls for 1 cup coconut, but I never used it and it is very good without the coconut Put all but nuts in double boiler and cook until thick. Excellent between the Chocolate Sour Cream cake and the drizzled fudge frosting over it all.

Summer German Chocolate Cake – Irving, TX 1956

2 cups sugar
1 cup Crisco
4 egg yolks
1 cup buttermilk 2 1/2 cups flour 1 tsp soda

1 tsp salt
4 egg whites (beaten stiff but not dry)
1 tsp vanilla
1 pkg German chocolate (4 ounces) dissolved in 1/2 cup hot water and cooled.

Cream sugar, Crisco and egg yolks together. Add flour, salt, and soda which has been dissolved in 1/4 cup buttermilk, and melted chocolate alternately with flour. Last add beaten egg whites & vanilla. Bake in 4 layers - at 350 degrees, 30 to 35 minutes. Put together with this creamy filling.

Filling
3 eggs yolks
1 1/4 cup sugar
1 cup coconut
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1 cup pet evaporated milk
1 tablespoon butter
Mix and cook in double boiler until thick. Cool and spread between layers, Ice over all with seven-minute icing or whipped cream.

Austin Women’s Club’s Three Layer German Chocolate Cake – Austin, TX 1957

2 cups sugar
1 cup shortening or butter

4 egg yolks, beaten
11/2 teaspoon salt
1 package Baker’s German Sweet chocolate 1⁄2 cup boiling water
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup buttermilk
3 cups shifted cake flour
1 teaspoon soda
4 egg white, beaten well

Cream together shortening and sugar. Add egg yolks, beating thoroughly after each addition. Add butter milk, alternately with sifted flour, salt and soda.

Melt chocolate in water over low heat. Add vanilla and cool. Add chocolate mixture to batter and mix well.

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg white. Pour into three greased and floured eight-inch pans or two 10-inch pans. Bake in a 350 F oven for 30 to 35 minutes. When cake is cool, ice with frosting.

Frosting
1 cup sugar
3 egg yolks
1 stick butter or margarine
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup pecan pieces
1⁄2 pint whipping cream, whipped 1 can angel Flake coconut

Combine sugar, egg yolks and butter in a sauce pan. Cook over low flame for about 12 minutes or until thick. Remove from flame and add vanilla. Fold in whipped cream, add pecans and coconut.

Original General Foods Recipe for German’s Chocolate cake

1 package (4 oz.) Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate 1⁄2 c boiling water
1 c butter
2 C sugar

4 egg yolks, unbeaten 1 teaspoon vanilla
1⁄2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon soda

2 1⁄2 c sifted Swans Down Cake Flour 1 c buttermilk
4 egg whites

Melt chocolate in 1.2 cup boiling water. Cool. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg yolks, one at a time, a beat well after each. Add the melted chocolate and vanilla. Mix well.

Sift together the salt, soda and flour. Then add alternately with buttermilk to chocolate mixture, beat well. Beat until batter is smooth.

Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form. Fold into batter. Pour into three 8-or 9-inc cake layer pans, lined on bottom with paper. Bake in moderate oven (350 F) 35 to 40 minutes. Cool. Frost tops only with coconut-Pecan Frosting, or use any favorite frosting or whipped cream.

Coconut-Pecan Frosting. 1 c evaporated milk
1 c sugar
3 egg yolks

1 pound margarine
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/3 c Baker’s coconut

1 c chopped pecans

Combine 1 cup of evaporated milk, 1 cup of sugar, 3 egg yolks, 1 pound of margarine, and 1 teaspoon vanilla in saucepan. Cook and stir over medium heat until mixture thickens – takes about 12 minutes,

Add about 1 1/3 cups Baker’s Coconut and 1 cup of chopped pecans. Beat until frosting is cool and thick enough to spread. Makes 2 2/3 cups.

Your turn and your culinary traditions

Do you have a dish that has been passed down for generations? What’s the story behind it?
Have you ever continued a family food tradition without knowing its true origin?

What’s a meal that instantly transports you to a specific time in your life?

Have you ever researched the origins of a favorite family dish? Did you discover any surprises?
What’s a food tradition in your family that you thought was unique—only to find out others do it, too?

Have you or a loved one ever cooked something regularly, even if you didn’t like it, just to make someone happy?
Is there a dish in your family that represents love, care, or sacrifice? What’s the story behind it?
Have you ever continued making a meal or dish in honor of someone who has passed away?
What’s a food tradition in your family that you wish you knew more about?