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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. She is currently on leave.
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Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero � all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.
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Putting the 'German's' Back in German Chocolate Cake

By Megan McArdle

Apr 11 2011, 3:43 PM ET Comment

Earlier today, I wrote about my voyages into the land of German Chocolate Cake.  Or maybe "near" the land of German Chocolate Cake would be a more accurate term, since I did not have the necessary ingredients (evaporated milk), or, frankly, the will to make a true German Chocolate Cake.


Reader MacAdvisor informs me that I wasn't even close.  Apparently, I am the culinary equivalent of Christopher Colombus:

Once again I leap into to the breach to save the proper name. The name of the cake you attempted to make was a German's Chocolate Cake. Note the possessive with German. Englishman Sam German created a brand of dark baking chocolate named after him, German's Sweet Chocolate. In 1957, the year of my birth, a Dallas, Texas, homemaker submitted the original recipe for "German's Chocolate Cake"to a local newspaper recipe contest. This recipe used German's Sweet Chocolate and was the winner of the contest.

Sales of Baker's Chocolate are said to have increased by as much as 73% from widespread publication of the recipe and the cake would become a national staple. To this day, it still has nothing to do with Germany and everything with Sam German. The chocolate is still available today with the brand owned by Kraft. You can see the original recipe at:

http://www.kraftrecipes.com/re...

The German's Chocolate, you will note, goes into the cake, not the frosting. Making a black devil's food cake with carmel coconut and pecan frosting is not a German's Chocolate Cake any more than Eggs Benedict can be made without the ham.



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