German Chocolate Cupcakes

Did you know that German chocolate cake was originally called German's chocolate cake and it was named after Sam German, a guy that created a dark baking chocolate? Yeah, I didn't know that. I thought it was named after the country. If you've never had German chocolate cake, it's so delicious. It's basically a delicious and fluffy chocolate cake (duh) topped with a gooey mixture of caramel and shredded coconut and pecans. It's decadent.

I made a batch of German chocolate cupcakes recently and topped them with a super quick version of the coconut & pecan topping. Today's post is actually just about that topping because I don't have a German chocolate cake recipe to share (sorry). But I would just use wooden spoon chocolate cake recipe and substitute the cocoa powder with 4 oz. of baking chocolate.

Ingredients (yields enough for one cake or 1.5 dozen cupcakes):
½ cup sweetened condensed milk
½ cup shredded coconut
¼ cup chopped pecans
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon molasses

So after you've baked your cupcakes or cake and they've had a chance to cool, you can get working on the topping.

The only real preparatory work you need to do is to chop up some pecans. If you bought pecans already chopped up, then you can skip this step, you smart time-saver, you.

Dump all of the ingredients into a bowl and mix together. That's it. That's how quick this topping is to make. The brown sugar and the molasses help to fake a caramel taste. The sweetened condensed milk is already thick and gooey so you don't need to do anything on the stove with evaporated milk and sugar. The work is already done for you.

All you have to do is spoon some topping right over your cakes and then enjoy the ooey, gooey, sugar. By the way, this topping would also be delicious over banana bread, carrot cake, regular chocolate cake, white cake; basically what I'm trying to say is that it's versatile.

I don't know about you, but I think this goopy topping makes these cupcakes look so much more delicious and fancy.

Here's the recipe page for the quick topping: