Who created National Chocolate Cake Day?

Nobody has been identified. No founder, sponsor or establishing record for it turned up, and nothing matching the name appears in the Federal Register's document index or in HathiTrust's full text of Chase's Calendar of Events.

What does Processed with alkali mean on a cocoa package?

It means the cacao was treated with an alkali ingredient such as potassium carbonate before it was ground. United States regulation caps how much may be used and requires the label to carry that statement beside the product name.

National Chocolate Cake Day

Next celebratedWednesday, January 27, 2027

Chocolate cake never needed an occasion, and National Chocolate Cake Day gives it one anyway. Bake a layer cake at home or carry a slice back from the bakery counter, whichever gets it on the table faster.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

--DAYS

--HRS

--MIN

--SEC

Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEJanuary 27

OBSERVED INUnited States

CATEGORYFood

SUBCATEGORYDesserts

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

Not documented

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

The earliest trace is a 2006 listing.

No founder, sponsor or establishing record for National Chocolate Cake Day has been located. The earliest archived online listing of the day was captured in February 2006, which dates the listing rather than the day.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday

INTRO

What the words on a cocoa tin are allowed to mean

Open Eliza Leslie's 1837 cookbook looking for chocolate cake and you will find one, filed under drinks. A chocolate cake was a solid block of chocolate, and the direction was to scrape a square of it down with a knife and mix it into hot water. National Chocolate Cake Day belongs to the other kind.

That kind is not in her book at all. Leslie printed one ten years later, in a volume her own title page calls a sequel to her former work on domestic cookery.

Everything that made the baked kind an ordinary thing came after Leslie shut her oven door. What changed first was the chemistry, and then what wartime did to the sugar.

ORIGINS

Chocolate Cake Day history

INTRODUCTION

The cake she printed in 1847 is mostly not chocolate. Her recipe calls for three ounces of it, scraped down. Against that sit a pound of powdered loaf sugar and fourteen ounces of sifted flour.

It has no chemical leavening either. There is no baking powder in it and no soda. The lift comes from the whites of ten eggs, beaten until they stand alone, and the cake then sits in the oven for at least four hours.

CHAPTER 01

Chemistry takes over from the eggs

By the 1918 revision of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, the arithmetic had changed. Fannie Farmer's Devil's Food Cake I creams butter and sugar, then leans on five teaspoons of baking powder. It bakes for forty-five to fifty minutes.

The book prints a rival version on the very next page. Devil's Food Cake II drops the baking powder and works with sour milk and soda instead.

CHAPTER 02

Baking through a sugar shortage

American sugar had grown scarce by 1942, and the cookbooks adjusted. The Wartime Cook Book, published that year in Chicago, answers with a Honey Chocolate Cake.

It takes three quarters of a cup of honey and two ounces of melted chocolate. There is one egg in it, separated, where Leslie had used ten.

CHAPTER 03

The calendar catches up with the cake

The cake kept getting easier, and the American food calendar eventually gave it a date of its own. Who put it there is not recorded.

The recipes are the real record. Read in order, four hours in a cooling oven becomes fifty minutes and a single egg.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Cocoa is the chocolate nut

Eliza Leslie's Directions for Cookery calls cocoa the chocolate nut before it is ground, and gives it its own recipe.

A cake made with chocolate

Leslie prints a chocolate cake recipe in The Lady's Receipt-Book, published in Philadelphia by Carey and Hart.

Two devil's food recipes

The revised Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries Devil's Food Cake I and Devil's Food Cake II as separate cakes.

A cake built on honey

The Wartime Cook Book prints a Honey Chocolate Cake for households working around the sugar shortage.

A Dallas recipe travels

A Texas homemaker sends a cake recipe to a Dallas newspaper, and sales of the sweet chocolate it calls for rise 73 percent in a year.

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Chocolate Cake Day

Your cocoa tin has to say what was done to it

United States law lets cacao nibs be treated with an alkali, but caps the dose at the neutralizing value of three parts anhydrous potassium carbonate per hundred parts of nibs. A cocoa treated that way must carry the words Processed with alkali beside its name.

One 1918 index lists nine chocolate cakes

Under the heading Cake, the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book files Chocolate I and II, Chocolate Fruit, Chocolate Marshmallow, Chocolate Nougat, Chocolate Sponge and Chocolate Vienna, alongside its two devil's food entries.

The 1847 cake is also a spice cake

Leslie sifts a powdered nutmeg and a teaspoonful of powdered cinnamon in with the flour, and the spice goes into the batter alongside the chocolate.

You were told to ice it only once it was cold

The 1847 recipe says that if nothing is to be baked afterwards, the cake should stay in until the oven goes cool. Then, and only then, ice it.

Chocolate came with its own kitchen tool

Leslie's 1837 book describes frothing a cup of chocolate with a chocolate mill, a little wooden instrument you twirl round in the cup until the top is covered with foam.

The alternatives are to make fewer cakes and cookies or to use brown sugar, honey or corn sirup.

The Wartime Cook BookEdited by Ruth Berolzheimer, 1942

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Chocolate Cake Day

CULTURE

The effort moved from the oven to the frosting.

The marketing innovation that came out of the 1950s cake mix research was a pitch rather than a recipe: the baked layers were recast as step one, and the finishing became the part a home cook owned. Snopes, citing Laura Shapiro, records that repositioning as the key change.

STANDARD

The chocolate has a legal floor

Chocolate liquor, the food made by finely grinding cacao nibs, is defined in United States regulation as containing not less than 50 percent nor more than 60 percent cacao fat by weight. What counts as chocolate in an American kitchen is settled in the Code of Federal Regulations.

CALENDAR

One cake, more than one day

The American food calendar treats the family as several separate observances, with devil's food cake keeping May 19 and German chocolate cake keeping June 11. This date belongs to the plain version, the one that needs no qualifier.

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

German chocolate cake is a German cake.

The truth

It takes its name from Sam German, who in 1852 developed a style of sweet baking chocolate for the Baker's chocolate company, and the company named the product after him. NPR notes that accounts differ on whether German was an American or an Englishman, and that the cake's name later lost its apostrophe-s.

The myth

Cake mixes only sold once companies made women add a fresh egg.

The truth

Snopes rates that story false. Cake mix sales doubled between 1947 and 1953, the slump came later when they rose only 5 percent between 1956 and 1960, and the two firms that dominated the market went opposite ways: General Mills chose fresh-egg mixes while Pillsbury sold complete ones with the dried egg already in.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Chocolate Cake Day

Bake a devil's food cake the 1918 way

Pick one of the two versions in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book and follow it as written. One version is raised with baking powder and the other with sour milk and soda, which is the point of making both.

READ

Read the 1847 recipe before you preheat anything

Leslie's chocolate cake runs to one dense paragraph and asks for an afternoon. Reading it first tells you exactly how much of modern baking is chemistry that somebody else already did.

CHECK

Check the cocoa tin for the alkali line

Turn the package over and look for the words next to the product name. If it says Processed with alkali, the cacao in that tin was treated before it was ground.

BUY

Buy a slice from a neighborhood bakery

Somebody near you makes a chocolate cake they are known for. Order the slice rather than the whole cake and you can try a second one somewhere else.

ASK

Ask an older relative for their chocolate cake recipe

Household recipes carry the shortcuts and substitutions of the decade they were written in. Copy it out by hand while there is still someone to explain the vague parts.

Test your knowledge