Sometimes when you’re grumpy the only thing that will bring you out of it is chocolate. Such was the case with me this week. For some reason I’ve had a major grump on lately and so finally I decided to do something about it – hence this recipe.

I’m a big fan of chocolate cake but I’m not a big fan of overly sweet chocolate cake. I find the cake mixes you buy in the grocery stores are borderline sickeningly sweet so I prefer to make homemade. This cake is full of chocolate flavor and not overly sweet. The flavor and texture remind me of a flourless chocolate cake. This cake is so good that once my husband and I took a bite of it we both agreed I needed to bring it to work otherwise we knew we would devour the whole thing in short measure all by ourselves. Better to let my co-workers devour it. And devour it they did.

So let’s talk chocolate sour cream cake…

Lesson Learned 1 – I found a neat trick for flouring a bundt pan: I don’t know about you, but I’ve always struggled with flouring a bundt pan once I’ve greased it. And especially with bundt pans, you need to make sure that the grease and flour hug every curve of the pan otherwise you’ll never get your cake out. I used to put flour in the pan and then stand over the garbage can and rotate it while tapping the sides. I knew I had to get the flour all the way to the top of the pan and I didn’t want to get flour all over the floor.

Then I read somewhere  an easier way to flour a bundt pan. Once you grease the pan and add some flour to it, cover the pan with plastic wrap. Then you can tap away to your heart’s content, get all of the sides floured and not worry about making a big mess. It was so much easier flouring the pan this way.

Lesson Learned 2 – The chocolate mixture will be thin and runny: This recipe calls for cooking the butter, cocoa powder and salt with some water. This combination makes a very runny mixture as evidenced in the picture below. Don’t worry about that. I found that providing the chocolate component to the recipe this way resulted in a somewhat thinner batter but an extremely moist cake. People were gushing as to how moist this cake is.

Lesson Learned 3 – This cake does not rise a lot so use a smaller bundt pan if you want a taller cake: I used a 12 cup bundt pan and the cake was a nice size but not as tall as some bundt cakes I’ve made in the past. The only leavening you use in this recipe is 1 teaspoon of baking soda so the cake does not rise very high. The cake was still super moist and I preferred this portion size, but if you’re a fan of a taller bundt cake you can use a 10 cup pan to achieve that effect.

Lesson Learned 4 – The frosting in this recipe is to die for: I approached the frosting differently and was genuinely pleased in both the flavor and consistency. The frosting in not overly sweet and has a nice thick texture to it. This frosting does not contain any confectioners sugar. It is a combination of chocolate, corn syrup (I used an organic light corn syrup with organic vanilla flavor), heavy cream and a touch of sugar. It was fabulous!

I think this will become my go-to chocolate cake recipe. My husband loved it and my co-workers devoured it. I hope it becomes your go-to chocolate cake recipe as well!