Tuesday night I was browsing through Lisa Yockelson's Baking By Flavor and I came across an interesting recipe in the "Chocolate" chapter for Cocoa-Sour Cream-Chocolate Chip Coffee Cake. It looked like it would be pretty quick to put together, so I decided to give it a try.The cake batter is just barely chocolate, containing flour, 2 tablespoons of cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, salt, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, sour cream, and miniature chocolate chips. The batter was just the slightest bit cocoa-colored.
An important part of this cake is the crumble topping. The crumble ingredients are 1 1/2 cups flour, 3/4 cup sugar, 3/4 cup brown sugar, a pinch of salt, 12 tablespoons cold butter, 1 cup chopped pecans, and 3/4 cups miniature chocolate chips. I was a little startled to see how much crumble the recipe makes; because I made the crumble in one of my Royal VKB Mix and Measure bowls that is marked with volume measurements, I know that I ended up with more than a liter and a half of crumble. It seemed like a completely excessive amount for a 9-inch by 13-inch cake, especially because the recipe specifically instructs you to use all of the crumble.
When I added all of the crumble on top of the cake batter in the pan -- making sure not to compress it, as the instructions specified -- the crumble came right up to the top of the 2-inch tall pan. The instructions did say to use a 13x9x3 inch baking pan, but I don't have a pan that high. I crossed my fingers that the cake wouldn't rise too much and cause the pan to overflow.
Fortunately, the cake didn't escape the pan during baking. While the cake did rise, I think that the weight of the crumble may have held back the batter a little, and the batter seemed to just rise into the crumble. According to the recipe, the cake should finish baking in 55-60 minutes. I started checking it at 55 minutes and re-checked it every 5 minutes after that, but it wasn't done until 85 minutes in the oven. At that point, the crumble topping was very golden brown, and the middle was still a touch damp. I'm thinking this cake batter might be better suited for a tube pan. But the crumble was sweet and buttery and it had a marvelous crunchy texture.I wouldn't really characterize this as a chocolate coffee cake, so I'm not quite sure why the recipe is in the "Chocolate" chapter of the cookbook. But it's a rich and moist cake with a terrific topping, and it was a nice change of pace from the more typical cinnamon streusel coffee cake.
Recipe: "Cocoa-Sour Cream-Chocolate Chip Coffee Cake," from Baking By Flavor, by Lisa Yockelson.
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