Great American Layer Cakes

Red Velvet Cake

Once upon a time, red velvet cake was a reddish-brown delicacy favored by the Victorians. Natural cocoa powder and tangy buttermilk gave red velvet its signature flavor as well as its russet hue, with the acidic cocoa and buttermilk reacting with basic baking soda to create a touch of red. So how did the barely red velvet cake transform into the gruesome red velvet armadillo groom’s cake featured in Steel Magnolias? Cocoa, like everything else, has changed over the years. Natural cocoa powder has been superseded by Dutch cocoa powder, which makes a run-of-the-mill brown-hued cake. By the 1960s, the mild red produced by cocoa powder was traded in for the brilliant results of red food coloring. Today, anything from beets to wine can be used to color a velvet cake—just as long as it's red.

German Chocolate Cake

Despite its misleading name, the American home baker should thank the Lone Star State for this coconut, caramel, pecan, and chocolate extravaganza. The original recipe called for a heaping dose of German’s Sweet Chocolate, a baking bar invented by Samuel German for Baker’s Chocolate Company in 1852. Flash forward to 1957, when the Dallas Morning News featured “German’s Chocolate Cake” as its delectable recipe of the day. Chocolate cake recipes were (and are) a dime a dozen, but this one had an instantly iconic component: a cooked coconut-pecan filling.

Italian Cream Cake

Certainly, there is such a thing as a real “Italian” cream cake, a ricotta- and fruit-filled dessert you can find in true Italian bakeries. But the American Italian cream cake is another 20th-century Southern invention: dense, covered in cream cheese frosting, and packed with some Southern favorites (coconut and pecans). Rumors and good recipes spread like wildfire in the South, so we don’t know who invented it or when exactly it came to be. The most debated factor of an Italian cream cake is its coconut-to-pecan ratio. Whatever the baker’s preference, there must