German Chocolate Cake

As you all know, I am working on setting up my own baking business and as part of that I need to get practice. To that end I sent out an email to my friends offering my cake baking services for the price of the ingredients. The response from everyone has been lovely, lots of "Good Lucks" and "Wows" some cake requests, yay! Thanks friends.
The first cake request was a German Chocolate Cake. My friends partner asked people at work if they had any cake needs and one American colleague asked for said German Chocolate Cake. My first thought was, never heard of that before, what is so special about this cake? I immediately turned to the interwebulator and lo and behold many entries and recipes for the German chocolate cake. It turns out that it has nothing to do with Germany the country, it is named after the type of chocolate used to make the cake and is an American sweet treat.
The chocolate used is German's chocolate which is a semi-sweet baking chocolate and apparently the recipe first appeared in 1957 and has been a popular American cake ever since. I looked at many recipes and decided on the one from the Joy of Baking, it gave some history behind the cake and also gave alternatives to the German's chocolate (which is rarely used these days). The cake is a triple chocolate layer cake with a caramel frosting flavoured with pecans and coconut. And so we came up against a problem, I don't own three 8in cake tins. In fact I have three tins that are of a size but are not quite 8in, crazy I know! These are tins that I have bought over the years and they all differ in size by very small amounts, one is 8in, one is just under and the other is about 7.5in!!! I'm sure they were sold to me as 8in tins.....I decided to use them because the thought of dividing the recipe in three and cooking each one separately hurt my head.
There are many ingredients in this cake, melted chocolate (I used a 60% cocoa solids chocolate), coffee, buttermilk and of course the usual butter, sugar, eggs and flour. But all very easy, it uses the creaming method and then all the other ingredients are folded in. I divided the batter between the three tins putting a bit more in the smaller tin to help keep the height the same as the other two, it made sense at the time!
While the cakes were cooling I made the frosting. It is a strange frosting made with egg yolks, sugar and either evaporated milk or double cream. I chose double cream. These are heated and stirred until the mixture thickens, it's almost like a custard. Once it reaches the right consistency it is taken off the heat and chopped pecans and coconut added. This is left for about 60 minutes and then it is ready for spreading.
The assembled cake is a whopper! The other thing about this cake is that it is not frosted all over, seeing the chocolate layers and frosting in between is all part of the fun. I put the smallest cake on the top and once it was iced it looked a bit wonky but I think it passed muster.

I delivered it to my friend and awaited the verdict. I wondered if it would be like the German chocolate cake that her colleague remembered from the US. A couple of days later and apparently it went down very well and reminded them of home! Mission accomplished.
Since then I have purchased two 8in cake tins and will rid myself of the "not quite 8in" ones.