One Thing I Ate: Ina’s Chocolate Cake with Sour Cream Chocolate Frosting 🍫
The best chocolate cake recipe ever, if I am so bold to say.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we bake a cake. Read past posts here, and please follow my Instagram, @fivethingsiate.
“I don’t really like chocolate cake,” I said out loud to my coworker, before I realized that I was wrong. A thing about me is that I will eat anything that is leftover in a communal fridge, which is how I ended up eating a slice of triple chocolate cake from our favorite Congrats You Are Leaving bakery, Molly’s Cupcakes. It turns out I really do like chocolate cake! It is very good. I liked it so much that I took a slice home, and then when I ran out I had to make my own.
This chocolate cake is nothing like the chocolate cake from Molly’s, which is a masterclass in indulgence, with chocolate ganache, and a layer of buttercream so thick there’s probably a stick of butter slathered on per slice, in the best of ways.
My chocolate cake is tender, extremely moist, and has a fluffy, tangy chocolate buttercream frosting that I cut with a bit of sour cream. The result tastes salty-sweet, almost like a fluffy moist cloud of a cake with a soft pillow of tangy sweet fudge frosting. If you put it in the fridge, both the cake and frosting will firm up.
Ina’s Chocolate Cake with Sour Cream Chocolate Frosting
Miss Ina never ever misses (see her tres leches, which is my favorite special occasion cake), and this chocolate cake is no exception. I never check my ingredients before I start baking so of course I realized I ran out of both powdered sugar and regular sugar, so I used brown sugar in the cake recipe and it turned out great. This cake is actually so moist and smooth and silky, I think it’s because of the cup of piping hot coffee (I used a teaspoon of instant in boiling water) kind of cooks the gluten, almost like tangzhong.
As I am a household of one chocolate cake eater (not that my cat wouldn’t try, she just absolutely shouldn’t), I halved this recipe and baked it in two loaf pans, then sandwiched them together, which is one of my favorite hacks for making a mini layer cake.
Also don’t come at me if you don’t use a cooking scale, you can halve the ingredients by volume yourself for the cake base here.
Dry Ingredients
109.5g all purpose flour
200g granulated sugar – I used brown sugar
32.5g cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
Wet Ingredients
120g (½ cup whole milk ½ tbs vinegar ) buttermilk
54.5g vegetable oil
1 egg
½ tsp vanilla extract
118.5g (½ cup ) hot coffee (or 1 tsp instant in half cup water just off the boil)
Preheat oven to 350F, and line 2 loaf pans with parchment paper and butter the exposed sides.
Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl.
Mix wet ingredients EXCEPT hot coffee in a medium bowl.
Slowly stir in wet ingredients into dry THEN slowly stream in hot coffee, whisk just till smooth.
Pour evenly into pans and bake approx. 30 mins, but check and see that it DOESN’T overcook, you should take out as soon as a toothpick inserted into the center comes clean. Set aside to cool for 5 min, then pop out of pan and cool on wire rack.
Chocolate sour cream buttercream (I made it up)
1 stick salted butter, room temp
1.75C (210g) confectioners’ sugar
1/4 cup (20 g) unsweetened natural or dutch-process cocoa powder
1.5 Tablespoons (23ml) heavy cream or milk
pinch salt
1 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
3-4 tbs sour cream
Beat butter with mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in confectioner’s sugar, cocoa, heavy cream, a pinch of salt, and vanilla. Beat in sour cream till tangy and fluffy. Frost and refrigerate leftovers.
Have a good weekend,
Soph
P.S. Feel free to forward this recipe to a friend <3