Germanchökolätekäke (Cold Stone Creamery) [+ Layer Cakes]

I've watched lines for too long outside of a food place, and I knew it was a matter of time before I went in. I've delayed mostly because of the calories I'd spend, but knew I'd go in eventually. Well, I finally went to Cold Stone Creamery to see what all of the excitement was about. You know the story: ice cream mixed with your choice of toppings, or pick from a list of prepared mixtures with names such as Mud Pie Mojo (coffee ice cream, peanut butter, almonds, fudge, oreo cookies), Birthday Cake (cake ice cream?, fudge, sprinkles, nuts), and Germanchökolätekäke (chocolate ice cream, coconut, pecans, fudge, caramel).

Knowing some German I can tell you that Chocolate is translated as Schokolade and cake as Kuchen or Torte. But Germanchökolätekäke does not have any meaning in German, and seems such a stretch from Schwarzwälderkirschtorte (Black Forest cake). Surely Germanchökolätekäke must have some meaning in English to put up on a menu for largely monolingual English speakers to understand.

Perhaps following the lead of Häagen Däzs they invented a name and a creative use of umlauts (those two dots over the vowel) to impart some kind of a meaning. Häagen Däzs was created some 20 or 30 years ago by two guys in New Jersey as a premium brand of ice cream with a very different name, and put a rough map of Scandinavia on the lid as if to suggest its origins as being different from The Garden State.

Here I think the image of umlauts has morphed from Sweden to Germany, along with pushing the words together, and changing the cäs to k?s. But with the combination of hard k?s and t?s interspersed with the umlaut-ed verbs I can only imagine someone pronouncing that word would sound like an idiot or a clown. A dancer in lederhosen, after slapping his knees and ankles.

So is this the image and taste of German food to come? Will a whole new generation of American children only know German food and life through comical characterizations?


How was the ice cream, you might ask. I really couldn't tell you, with all of that stuff mixed in.

Rich4 wrote:Germanchökolätekäke

Hmmm... There seems to be one umlaut too few here... Germanchökolätekäke... Now, clearly, this is not German but a form from a language with front/back vowel harmony... all the vowels in a given word must agree in this feature... perhaps a Turkic language... perhaps there's a connexion to the burek and, via Kansas, the Hamburger...


Antonius
________________

HI,

I thought there was some sort of joke going on when I read your subject title. I just didn't believe anyone would do what they did on purpose. Of course, I have heard of people intentionally putting accents in children's names for some sophisticated affect. Just like Cold Stone Creamery, the accents were aesthetics rather than any remotely linguistic basis.

My parents for their anniversary had a cake from Cold Stone Creamery. They had gone to a 'senior' prom where this cake was obtained via a raffle. I only had half a slice, which was so cold from the freezer I left it on the counter for 1/2 an hour to warm up.

Once I ate the ice cream cake, everything was at the slightly mushy stage, which was pretty good. I suspect most eat straight out the freezer, but some patience will bring out the flavors and textures better. I'm not going to race out to buy another, but I won't shy away from it either.

My sister-in-law is a huge fan of the Cold Stone Creamery, and so I've had it a few times. Overall, it's one of the worst ice creams I've ever had -- I think the reason they really push the mix-ins is because on its own, the ice cream is beyond lousy. Rich to the point of being sickening (some flavors are akin to eating straight butter), with an odd, mushy/slimy texture. Like so many other things, its extreme popularity is just incomprehensible to me.

Anne wrote:Overall, it's one of the worst ice creams I've ever had -- I think the reason they really push the mix-ins is because on its own, the ice cream is beyond lousy. Rich to the point of being sickening (some flavors are akin to eating straight butter), with an odd, mushy/slimy texture.

What do you like in an ice cream? I'd rather have one butterfat rich than thin and tasteless. I'm not defending Cold Stone Creamery, my only taste was the anniversary cake, which had so much going on it was distracting.

Like so many other things, its extreme popularity is just incomprehensible to me.

I think people are gravitating toward the gimmick of having their ice cream mixed for them. Some of these gimmicks last and others disapeer fast.

Earlier this year, there was a discussion of uncooked assembled pizzas you cook at home, which seemed to be the worst of both worlds: commercial pizza cooked at home. Yet these places are popping up all over.

AnneVdV wrote:My sister-in-law is a huge fan of the Cold Stone Creamery, and so I've had it a few times. Overall, it's one of the worst ice creams I've ever had -- I think the reason they really push the mix-ins is because on its own, the ice cream is beyond lousy. Rich to the point of being sickening (some flavors are akin to eating straight butter), with an odd, mushy/slimy texture. Like so many other things, its extreme popularity is just incomprehensible to me.

Not that it in anyway undermines Rich4's inspired post, but in my one visit to Cold Stone Creamery (well I visited twice, but once I did not feel like putting up with the lines), I found the ice cream quite tasty. Fresh, inspired flavors, not really needing any mix-in.

Overall, it's one of the worst ice creams I've ever had -- I think the reason they really push the mix-ins is because on its own, the ice cream is beyond lousy. Rich to the point of being sickening (some flavors are akin to eating straight butter), with an odd, mushy/slimy texture. Like so many other things, its extreme popularity is just incomprehensible to me.

I agree that Cold Stone is less than stellar, but have different reasons for feeling that way. I enjoy the richness and creamy texture of their ice cream, but the excessive sweetness of some flavors (such as the birthday cake ice cream) and blatant artificiality (like the fruit flavors, especially banana) of others literally turns my stomach. I much prefer a place like Bittersweet, which doesn't get much play on this board for its ice cream. On recent trips there, though, the dulce de leche, chocolate fudge turtle, and lemon verbena have been excellent. I find the aforementioned flavors richer and purer, and thus lacking any cloying dimensions. The only problem with Bittersweet is that the "to go" pints are often saturated with ice crystals, so you should restrict your orders to the rotating flavors of the day from the bins up front.

Rich4 wrote:Germanchökolätekäk (chocolate ice cream, coconut, pecans, fudge, caramel).

Knowing some German I can tell you that Chocolate is translated as Schokolade and cake as Kuchen or Torte. But Germanchökolätekäk does not have any meaning in German, and seems such a stretch from Schwarzwälderkirschtorte (Black Forest cake). Surely Germanchökolätekäk must have some meaning in English to put up on a menu for largely monolingual English speakers to understand.

Perhaps following the lead of Häagen Däzs they invented a name and a creative use of umlauts (those two dots over the vowel) to impart some kind of a meaning....

So is this the image and taste of German food to come? Will a whole new generation of American children only know German food and life through comical characterizations?

The funny thing about this language looniness is that the German chocolate cake they're alluding to isn't a cake from Germany at all. It's an American cake named for a primary ingredient: Baker's German's Sweet Chocolate. The recipe dates to 1957.

It's an American cake named for a primary ingredient: Baker's German's Sweet Chocolate. The recipe dates to 1957

That's just too precious Leah!

You know when you think about it, your information makes sense. German chocolate cake's specialness for me is the frosting which features coconut and pecans. Pecans are almost exclusively grown in the United States, which are rare and expensive in Europe. Coconut isn't exactly a traditional ingrediant in Germany, though anything is possible for a special occasion cake.

Thanks for the culinary history.

LAZ!

I spent yesterday afternoon in the local library collecting information for a research project. One piece of information was in Saveur magazine, but I didn't know which issue. So I read through a considerable amount of 2 years of back issues, then hit the copy machine to record some recipes. I was in hog heaven reading those magazines and vowed to renew my lapsed subscription.

I had a subscription to Saveur for several years but allowed it to lapse when I never found myself reading it. It was around the same time I dropped Bon Appetit and my 25 year plus association with Gourmet. I have every Cook's Illustrated, which I do refer back to often. My local library does get Bon Appetit, Gourmet and Saveur, so I do have access when I want.

Yesterday, I read a recipe for a Southern favorite called the Lane Cake. I will suggest the Lane Cake is an earlier variant of what we now call the German Chocolate Cake. In the variant listed in Saveur, the filling is also used on the exterior frosting, where the major frost ingrediants are pecans, grated coconut and raisins, not a big drift from German Chocolate Cake's signature frosting. The cake is a vanilla sponge rather than chocolate, which is also not a big departure. Anyway, I think there are elements of the Lane Cake which inspired the German Chocolate Cake.

I haven't made a cake in a quite a while, but I just have to make this one real soon.

Yet another thanks for the info on german chocolate cake. I have had one for my birthday every year since I was 4. It has become something of a tradition for me, a welcome one at that as it is among my favorite types:)

Cathy2 wrote:
Yesterday, I read a recipe for a Southern favorite called the Lane Cake. I will suggest the Lane Cake is an earlier variant of what we now call the German Chocolate Cake. In the variant listed in Saveur, the filling is also used on the exterior frosting, where the major frost ingrediants are pecans, grated coconut and raisins, not a big drift from German Chocolate Cake's signature frosting. The cake is a vanilla sponge rather than chocolate, which is also not a big departure. Anyway, I think there are elements of the Lane Cake which inspired the German Chocolate Cake.

Cathy, your mention of the Lane Cake piqued my curiosity. I looked in one of my Southern cookbooks, Classical Southern Cooking by Damon Lee Fowler, which has a recipe for Lane cake similar to the one you found (coconut, raisins, and pecans in the filling; the cake layers are not chocolate but rather "Silver, or Lady Cake", made with egg whites only and flavored with one of the following: rose water, orange-flower water, lemon, or vanilla).

Fowler has a side bar about the eponymous Lane. Emma Rylander Lane of Alabama published a cookbook in 1898 entitled Some Good Things to Eat which included a recipe she just called her "prize cake". But her original recipe contained only raisins in the filling. The cake became popular and other ingredients were added to the filling of the cakes called Lane Cakes. Nowadays the recipes usually include coconut and pecans, according to Fowler.

Hi,

I had wanted to link to the Saveur recipe, submitted by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock, but it wasn't available. Saveur mentioned the coconut-raisin-pecan mixture is for the filling only. The recipes I linked to had an addition to this filling of sliced Maraschino cherries, which must look absolutely stunning in the middle of white frosted vanilla (or whatever flavoring) cake. If you slipped some cherries into the Saveur recipe, where the entire cake is frosted with the filling, what lively eye candy.

The only ingrediant I would cut back severely or eliminate is the bourbon. This would not go over well with my family or myself; just don't like that strong taste. I would substitute milk because that liquid is required. Maybe for a Chowist occasion, I would follow the recipe exactly. For my home crowd, no way.

I can completely understand why Mrs. Lane would refer to this as a prize cake. I'm sure it was the talk of her social circle. It was wonderful she choose to openly share it because some cooks take their ideas to the grave. Yes, one can reverse engineer but not everyone's palate or experience can pull it off.

[Edit: corrected glaring spelling error]

Well, Cathy, if you make a Lane cake this image may serve as a model:



[from www.bookloverscookbook.com ]

Or, click here for a larger version of that picture.

Good luck!

(Edited to replace annoying large picture with small version.)

I always do think of layer cakes as being Southern somehow. They're also quintessentially American. Oh, there are German tortes and French gateaux, but a big ol' piece of layer cake is a really American dessert.

I'm always suckered in by the beautiful-looking ones in the Greek coffeeshops, only to be disappointed. I had a slice of chocolate fudge tonight at The Melrose, another one of my 24-hour hangouts. It wasn't bad -- but the frosting was too sweet and the cake a little too dense and dry.

The best layer cake I can remember having in a restaurant in recent times was a lovely coconut cake at Smith & Wollensky.

I suppose it's out of fashion as a restaurant dessert.

The Melrose
77201 N. Caldwell, Niles
(847) 588-1500

Smith & Wollensky
Marina City
318 N. State St., Chicago
(312) 670-9900

LAZ wrote:I suppose it's out of fashion as a restaurant dessert.

Hi,

In prior years, fruit pies were the every day dessert. Layer cakes were the special occasion dessert. Presently, pies seem to held in higher esteem than a good layer cake. Yet it is much more difficult to find a good pie than a good layer cake.

There was an article on layer cakes, I think it was Cook's Illustrated, which confirmed your notion layer cakes are out of fashion. Though highly stylized desserts, where they assemble components then add bells and whistles, are very much in. Certainly, stylized desserts are mix and match and perhaps (perhaps!) less labor intensive and more economical. If you have clientelle pass on your layer cake and it needs to be tossed, that is a bigger economic hit than morphing the components into something else.

Less labor intensive and more easily held may be part of it -- that certainly must have been a factor when cannoli gave way to tiramisu as the premier Italian-restaurant dessert.

But there are definitely dessert fashions: Tiramisu gave way to warm chocolate ooze cake (or volcano cake or whatever you want to call it) which gave way to creme brulee.

I'd like to see layer cakes come back, and also -- especially -- fruit desserts, but I'm guessing that we're due for another stretch of something gooey and chocolate.

LAZ wrote:I always do think of layer cakes as being Southern somehow. They're also quintessentially American. Oh, there are German tortes and French gateaux, but a big ol' piece of layer cake is a really American dessert.

I'm always suckered in by the beautiful-looking ones in the Greek coffeeshops, only to be disappointed. I had a slice of chocolate fudge tonight at The Melrose, another one of my 24-hour hangouts. It wasn't bad -- but the frosting was too sweet and the cake a little too dense and dry.

The best layer cake I can remember having in a restaurant in recent times was a lovely coconut cake at Smith & Wollensky.

I suppose it's out of fashion as a restaurant dessert.

The Melrose
77201 N. Caldwell, Niles
(847) 588-1500

Smith & Wollensky
Marina City
318 N. State St., Chicago
(312) 670-9900

You know on another food site filled with food snobs, I wrote about how much I liked Smith and Wollensky and that it was basically a very good diner. Thanks for giving me another talking point on this theme.

Rob

Layer cakes (and sheet cakes) -- including German chocolate -- are commonly offered at soul food resturants in Chicago, confirming the Southern-roots theory suggested above.