Dad's Favorite Cake: German Chocolate Cake

For as long as I can remember, my mom always made my dad a German chocolate cake for his birthday. As far as I know, the only thing that can trump this dessert in my dad's mind is New York cheesecake with cherry topping. The man has good taste!

This year we celebrated my dad's birthday a bit early at our house because a bunch of us are traveling on his actual birthday. As far as I'm concerned, I think birthdays should be celebrated for a week, so this worked out just fine. We were installing a new faucet and had a few glitches, so I wimped out and we had pizza for dinner. However, I still made him his favorite cake. I'm considering this semi-homemade since I used a box of chocolate cake mix, but I just happened to have all the ingredients for the gooey good topping.

German Chocolate Cake Coconut Topping:
Ingredients:
1 cup evaporated milk
1 cup brown sugar
3 egg yolks
1/2 cup butter (one stick)
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup flake coconut (sweetened is fine)
1 cup chopped pecans (optional)

Directions:
In a large saucepan, combine evaporated milk, brown sugar, egg yolks, butter and vanilla. I mixed all the ingredients in a cold pan as best as I could first and then heated it up so the egg yolks didn't cook too fast. Otherwise you could have weird egg chunks. Ew. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until thick. Remove from heat and stir in pecans (optional) and coconut. Let cool to room temperature before spreading on cake. Also, make sure that the cake has cooled otherwise all your waiting will have been wasted.

Since I didn't get to snap a picture of the cake before writing up this post, I have a funny story (with a picture) about cake. Last year, I was asked to make my then-soon-to-be father-in-law's favorite dessert, which is also German chocolate cake, for what I thought was going to be his surprise birthday party. So here I get all dressed up cute, but not too fancy that I couldn't play with my then-future niece and nephews out in the yard, bake a cake and hop in the truck with Steve only to show up at my own bridal shower at my then-fututure-sister-in-law's house! SURPRISE!

Why is the backyard so quiet? What is going on?

Guys?!

Later, Steve's dad did show up to help tear down tables and stuff. He asked where his cake was. I said he could have the cake, but we were keeping the gifts. I thought that was a fair trade.