high-bar baking

I’m confident that I overuse the expression “this is THE xyz.” I see no reason to stop now.

This is THE chocolate cake. None other can compare. It’s the Two Chicks from the Sticks Sour Cream Chocolate Cake, but I call it my Monogamy Chocolate Cake. Because every time I cheat on this cake, every time I think some other recipe can do it for me better, I regret it. Every time. 

Now, I have found a Devil’s Food that is wonderful, but that’s a story for another day. What matters now is that this cake is perfect enough to never require any other. This is everything a chocolate cake should be, and nothing that it shouldn’t. 

How does it do it? Chocolate cakes have a couple of pitfalls. A lot of them try to be butter based, because butter tastes better. But that makes them dry. Butter is solid at room temperature, which means the cake isn’t moist. You need fat that’s moist at room temp; this matters particularly in the case of chocolate. Compensating with buttermilk will not help you (@Claire, sorry) because buttermilk has very little fat. (Buttermilk is the byproduct of beating cream into butter; the fat ends up in the butter and the buttermilk is what’s left). I’ve never met a butter + buttermilk chocolate cake that was anything good. 

The buttermilk situation doesn’t apply when the cake is oil based. In that instance, the buttermilk is there for flavour, and the oil provides the fat. This is how Zoë makes a banger Devil’s Food Cake, and I’ve seen lots of recipes do the same thing with much success. 

The boxed Devil’s Food Cake I ate as a child was this way; most boxed cake mixes are. You add eggs and oil to the provided dry ingredients, then bake. This means the cakes are wonderfully moist, if not super flavourful. When I was a kid, my birthday cake every year was that from-mix chocolate cake. Then my mom would poke holds in the cake with a pencil (wrapped in Saran Wrap, we’re not animals) and pour caramel sauce down the holes. Then she’d frost the whole thing in Cool Whip and grate a Butterfingers on top. Needless to say, I value a moist chocolate cake more than anything else in the world. 

But what if I could have all the moistness-bordering-on-wetness (who’s uncomfortable now?) and the flavour of butter? That’s this cake, ladies and gents. 

It starts with an insane amount of brown sugar. It’s all brown sugar, which is wonderful because brown has more moisture than granulated (which one clumps and gets hard?). It’s also nice to have for the acid. Then butter. And to keep everything soft, tender, and decadent, not to mention delicious, the sour cream. A frightening amount. Between the cake and the frosting, this recipe uses a pound and a half of sour cream. Then boiling water to turn it into pure liquid. Some people order their coffee thicker than this batter. 

Sidebar: a good chocolate cake should always use cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate. Melted chocolate gets you richness but not much flavour. Don’t bother. This rule doesn’t apply to frostings. Also, I love that this recipe makes three layers. It’s the size I want for an occasion like this. I’m going through the effort. I want the full nine yards.

Which, if you haven’t figured out by now — this is my birthday cake. Every year since I have discovered it. I wouldn’t want to ring in 27 any other way.

My notes on baking include: don’t go anywhere near the cakes until they look mostly set. Don’t rotate them while they’re still liquid. It’s not worth the inevitable collapse. Please do sift the dry ingredients. The authors don’t even say to, but I do. Also, contrary to accepted norms, when you add in the dry mixture and the sour cream/water to the butter mixture, don’t do it the usual way. Normally, you’re supposed to add dry and wet alternating, starting and ending with dry for a total of five separate additions. In this cake, only do four. Start with dry, add the sour cream, the other half of the dry, then the boiling water. Trying to add any part of the flour mixture after you’ve done the water just leads to lumps. 

The layers cracked more than I wanted them to. I was too gun-shy from my last pizza night to modify the recipe in any way, but I think next time I will knock the leavener down ever so slightly to see if I can fix that. These layers have the tops that are very sticky. My recommendation to get them onto the rack with as few tears as possible (that’s tears as in “water that comes out of my eyes,” not “cracks and fissures in the cake,” if you were wondering) is to dust the tops of the layers with powdered sugar while they’re still in the pans. Then invert them onto a plate and right them onto the wire rack. I’ve done this before with success by dusting the plate, but this time I realized there were much more direct ways to protect the top. Dust the cakes themselves! You won’t notice anything later; you’re going to frost them anyway, and frosting is just powdered sugar. 

The frosting is also to die for. Sour cream plus butter strikes again, and the acid balances out the powdered sugar so perfectly. Don’t make any of the frosting layers too thick. The recipe makes way more frosting than you need, so freeze it for later. Don’t put it all on, or it will be way too much. If you keep that in mind, you won’t have any issues with discerning adults at your party saying things like, “The cake is great but the frosting’s too sweet!”

I accidentally found a great configuration for 27 candles, which I couldn’t recreate if I tried, I’m sure. I usually end up cutting one slice per raspberry, so be careful how you place those, I suppose. And take a bigger breath than I did for blowing out the candles… we almost didn’t make it!