Chocolate Sour Cream Cake with Chocolate & Sour Cream Glazes

  • Chocolate Sour Cream Cake with Chocolate & Sour Cream Glaze

    Don’t get all “sour cream?” on me, with that look on your face.

    You know that a baked potato would be nothing but for the sour cream (and the cheese and the bacon and the chives, and the butter, too, but you grasp my point), so why question it in a cake?

    I wondered about the merits of sour cream in baking back in the early 90s when Tim Horton’s came out with their sour cream glazed donut.  As a rule of thumb, if you glaze anything, I’m game (especially a donut, with excessive and gaudy amounts of glaze pooling around the edges).  Bring on the sour cream donut, I thought- and then never turned back.  Sour cream gave the donut the tang that buttermilk brings to the table sometimes, but just seemed exotic and new.  (It was suburban smallish-town Ontario, so even flavored pop seemed exotic.  I’m not even kidding.  The Pop Shoppe was where it was at.)

    As for the sour cream glaze that I also poured over top the cake in this recipe, well.  You’ll notice that there is a chocolate glaze going on as a base layer, just to add more sinful richness (and to keep the chocolate cake purists happy).  Adding the sour cream glaze layer on top of that was a nod to my distant donut memories, and out of a consistent desire to be excessive (oh, and a desire to use the rest of the sour cream in the fridge- that, too).  Rarely do I make a sour cream glaze, but they’re often featured in cheesecakes and other bar recipes, so I knew that the cream & sugar combo would go down just fine.  My favorite thing about this mini-Bundt cake is the fact the little hole in the center is nearly filled with the chocolate and sour cream glazes.  Almost to the top.  Really.  Look closely at the picture.  How can a cake like this be resisted?  (Sorry- who said anything about resistance?  Nobody did.  Go forth and bake, eat, and be happy.)

    CAKE:

    1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

    3/4 cup unsweetened natural cocoa powder (not the Dutch processed kind)

    1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

    3/4 teaspoon baking soda

    1/2 teaspoon salt

    1 cup sour cream

    1/3 cup water

    2 teaspoons vanilla

    1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

    1 cup light brown sugar, firmly packed

    1/3 cup sugar

    3 eggs

    CHOCOLATE GLAZE:

    2/3 cup bittersweet chocolate chips (or about 4 oz. if chopped off a block)

    1 1/2 tablespoons corn syrup

    1/2 cup heavy cream

    1 1/2 tablespoons sugar

    SOUR CREAM GLAZE:

    1 cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted

    ¼ cup sour cream

    1. Preheat oven to 350° and grease a Bundt cake pan or 4 mini Bundt cake pans with butter or non stick spray.
    2. In a large bowl, combine first five ingredients (flour through salt) with a whisk and set aside.
    3. In a medium bowl, mix sour cream, water and vanilla together.
    4. In a separate large bowl, beat butter until fluffy (up to 2 minutes), and scrape sides of bowl before adding sugars.  Beat for 3 minutes, then add eggs one at a time, beating 45 seconds between each addition (scraping the bowl as you go).
    5. Add flour mixture and sour cream mixture in alternating batches, beginning and ending with the flour mixture (so it should go like this: dry, wet, dry, wet, dry).
    6. Pour batter into prepared pan(s) and bake for 40 – 45 minutes for a full cake, and 25 – 30 minutes for mini cakes (or until a cake tester pulls out mostly clean of crumbs when inserted into the middle of one side of the cake).  Allow to cool for 5 minutes then remove from pan to finish cooling on a wire rack.
    7. CHOCOLATE GLAZE: In a small bowl, combine chocolate chips and corn syrup.  In a small saucepan over medium heat, stir cream with sugar until sugar is dissolved and cream  just starts to bubble and boil.  Pour hot cream mixture over chocolate, allow to sit for a minute or so, then whisk until smooth.  Pour over cooled cake and allow to set before pouring sour cream glaze over top as top layer.
    8. SOUR CREAM GLAZE: In a small bowl or measuring cup, stir icing sugar with sour cream until pourable (you might need to microwave for 10 – 15 seconds to make sour cream runnier, or add more sour cream or milk to the glaze to achieve the right consistency).  Pour over top of chocolate glaze and allow to set before serving.

    Tips:

    • No sour cream?  Um, you kind of really need it for this recipe.  You could try Greek yogurt if you must, or mayo (yes, mayo), but I can’t vouch for the finished product.  (If you use either alternative then report back to me pronto, please.)  Oh- you can only use these substitutions in the cake itself, not in the glaze.  A mayo glaze would be certifiably horrible.
    • Cocoa powder can be bought as natural or Dutch processed.  It’s really confusing.  The Dutch processed kind required less baking powder and soda in a recipe because of the way it’s treated, etc. etc. etc. (more boring food science shit).  All you need to know is, for this recipe, use the natural kind.  If it says Dutch processed or anything about alkaline on the container, don’t use it.  There.
    • Slacker options for this recipe include making only one glaze, or melting some store-bought chocolate frosting in a measuring cup (just until runny) and pouring that over your Bundt cake instead of making the home made chocolate jobbie.
    • Semi sweet chocolate can be subbed in for the bittersweet if you want… just omit the 1 1/2 tablespoons of sugar when you heat up the cream.
    • When pouring the sour cream glaze on top of the set chocolate glaze, make sure it’s not too warm (assuming you needed to microwave it a bit), or it might melt the chocolate layer underneath.
    • Garnish this cake, dear baker!  I wish I had because I think it looks sad (it does look a little anemic, doesn’t it?).  A few shavings off a block of any kind of chocolate would have looked good.  Or even a few toasted, chopped nuts.  Or mini chocolate chips.  Or any kind of chips (like this cake here, which looked good with little chips on top).  You do know that I’m talking about sweet flavored chips and not potato chips, right?

     

     

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    October 5th, 2013 | More Sweets Please | No Comments | Tags: , ,

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