cubes of colossal cheer
Today was my unofficial return to cubicle-land and it was great! No really! Little did I know all I had to do was fall down a flight of stairs to be overjoyed with the normalcy of showing up to work on a Monday morning. I kid, of course, they’re really very nice to me even when I don’t show up bruised, achy and slinged, regaling them with the now-familiar saga of my drunken bar scrap. But, it was an especially delightfully un-manic Monday as the sharp pain in my right rib cage has finally subsided leaving me with a shoulder that really doesn’t hurt much at all, and also, I’ve gotten this two-hand typing thing mastered so let’s celebrate! Let us eat some cake.
Of course, there’s not a whole lot to say about mom’s sour cream cinnamon chocolate chip coffee cake except that a) It’s absolutely perfect in every possible way — soft, plushy bites of uber-moist goodness broken up by cinnamon-sugar crusted chocolate chips. b) Be careful biting into it as it might make you feel unintentionally wronged by every coffee cake that has crossed your palate before it. c) He hasn’t said it in so many words (except, notably, “If your mom isn’t making that coffee cake I’m not coming over for Yom Kippur.”) but I think it may be the real reason Alex married me.
And d) I’m not even offended.
Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Cake
1 stick butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 eggs, separated
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
16 ounces sour cream
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
12 ounces chocolate chips
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Preheat oven to 350°F.
In a large bowl, cream butter and 1 1/2 cups sugar, then mix in the egg yolks and vanilla. Sift flour, baking soda and baking powder together into a separate bowl. Alternately add sour cream and then dry ingredients into butter mixture. Beat eggs whites until stiff, then fold into batter. Mix last 1/2 cup sugar and cinnamon together in a separate, small dish.
In a greased 9″x13″ pan, pour in half of the cake batter. Sprinkle the top with half of the cinnamon-sugar mixture and half of the chocolate chips. Pour remaining batter on top, sprinkling the top with the remaining cinnamon-sugar and chocolate chips.
Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean.
Fairly high praise! Looks super good.
Love the look of that top.
Hi Deb,
I’m a longtime reader but first-time commenter… love the site! And that coffee cake looks amazing.
Anyway, I’m sure you get recipe requests all the time, so no obligation of course… but I’m trying to find a good recipe for pumpkin bread and having some trouble. I made a great easy chocolate-chip pumpkin bread a few years ago and can’t figure out where the recipe came from or what I did with it. Any ideas?
Thanks so much!!
Jill
Hi Deb,
Glad you are feeling better.
I would like to make this cake. Silly question from the Canadian: what is 1 stick of butter equivalent to in cups?
I think I’ll have to make that for my Thanksgiving guests who are staying over Thursday night. Or even if no one decides to stay. Because, Yum!
Cat, check Deb´s tools section, it has most conversions there.
1 stick = 4 ounces = 8 tablespoons = ½ cup
After such high praise, I´m gonna have to make this cake (so please stop twisting my arm :P). But the problem is sour cream is not available here. At Cooking for engineers, one of the substitution choices they give is plain yogurt. Do you think I would get an equivalent result with this recipe using plain yogurt?
Great! I’m going to make this for Christmas Day brunch at my Aunt’s house.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Marce - I make pancakes with either sour cream, ricotta or yogurt and they are all good and somewhat similar. Sour cream and ricotta tend to give greater desnity and moisture in pancake texture (hard to describe) than yogurt. A suggestion. If you use yogurt, I would use some non-gelatin kind (i.e., not dannon or yoplait) and let it drain for a bit in some cheesecloth (otherwise it might increase the fluids too much). I expect using ricotta would throw off the acid balance, but since it’s baking powder on not soda maybe it would be okay, or mabe add a squeeze of lemon? Yogurt would probably be a safer bet.
This coffee cake looks scrumptious!
YUMMGUMMMYUMGUM Chocolate chip cake good.
Ooh, yum. This is just like my mom’s coffee cake. I’m going to have her dig up the recipe for me when I go home over the weekend.
Yum! You know something is going to be delicious when the title of it has to be that long just to describe its goodness.
I am so making this. Would it be wrong to run out from work right now to do so?
Deb, This looks amazing! As a teacher, occasionally I take in treats for my students after finishing big projects. This will be perfect as they are just finishing up writing a paper! As always, Thank You!!!
P.S. You are the inspiration for my blog these days!!! I really appreciate your example! Thanks so much!
Oh lord, your great NaBloPoMo is killing me, I have so many recipes racked up to try that I’m drowning. I”m currently doing NaNoWriMo so at this point in the month, cooking is taking a backseat (oops) but I am SMITTEN with your KITCHEN. Haha sorry that was really corny. Mmm… cake.
It does look amazing — wonderful blog!
Looks yummy!
If you did it again, would you coat the choc. in flour so they don’t all just sink to the bottom? Or is that part of what makes it so good?
So, this is totally unrelated to the coffee-cake post (but somehow, I can’t find the recipe to which I will refer…anyway, sorry for the misplaced comment).
Last night I made the Couscous and Feta-Stuffed Peppers, which were really good. However, I have a question…unless I missed it, I can’t figure out what I was supposed to do with the tomato paste.
The ingredients list “3 tbsp tomato paste” - but nowhere in the recipe does it say to use the tomato paste.
Can you enlighten me?
MMmmmm yum! I made this cake this evening and it was wonderful. I did not have sour cream, so I substituted lowfat yogurt. Unfortunately the yogurt was vanilla flavor instead of plain. I was worried about it being too sweet, so I added instant espresso powder (1/4 cup) to the sugar/chocolate chip mixture and I think that helped.
Also very much enjoying NaBloPoMo! I am quite impressed you’re doing all this with your hurt arm - hope it gets better soon.
Rachael 1- Thanks for the answer. I have both ricotta and whole plan yogurt. I think I´ll go with the yogurt and let it drain for a while just in case.
Rachael 2- Thanks to you too for confirming it works with yogurt. Mine has no sugar, so I shouldn´t have a problem with the sweetness.
Denise- I figured the tomato paste was mixed with the couscous mix. I did it like that and it tasted great.
Deb- I´m not trying to steal your position answering questions. I´m just nosy like that. Besides, I wanted to help, you have to do all of it with one (or one and a half) hands ;)
Tanna - Usually, the top is even crunchier but mom was in a rush and covered the pan with foil just out of the oven. If possible, this made it taste better than ever.
Jill - I actually haven’t found the perfect pumpkin bread yet either, but I did have my mother (again with the mom!) try this one, which she said was very good but needed a lot more spice. I suppose it’s a matter of personal taste, but if you like it spicier, just go ahead and double all of them. Pumpkin seems to absorb all these flavors well. And of course, you can replace the walnuts with flour-dusted chocolate chips (floured so they don’t sink).
Jill - Looks like Marce answered first but 1 stick is a quarter pound, 8 tablespoons and ½ cup melted, too.
Jessie - Let us know how it goes!
Marce - I have actually made this with yogurt before and it came out just fine. Rachael’s advice below is even better. Oh, and you are so *allowed* (please!) to answer questions in the comments. I really wanted to get to these questions sooner but day job, daily posting and baking two cheesecakes tonight has been a whirlwind.
Tammi - Hope you like it!
Rachael - Thank you thank you. Excellent advice. I even wonder if buttermilk could work - it having that tangy dairy thing - but wouldn’t know how much to replace it with without trying it myself.
Hilary - You should, and share it. I’d love to compare.
Jennifer - Heh. I’ve been trying to reign in my titles, too. (This from a girl who once titled a post “conversations in the past month that have led me to say to my fiancé: i don’t know why my parents have to spend so much money on this party when we are clearly, already married.” and another “instances in the past week that have caused my husband to refer to me as a curmudgeon”.)
Jennifer - Nope, such behavior is encouraged at the Smitten Kitchen.
Married Girl - I brought this cake into school so many times growing up, so I can attest, it’s perfect for the cause.
Yvo, Rebekah - Thank you.
MW - So, I didn’t know how to mention this but my mother (sorry mom!) kind of threw the cake together in a rush and didn’t follow the half batter, half chips, half cinnamon-sugar, etc. technique which is why all the chips are at the bottom. While this was still very very delicious in every possible way, if you make it the way I describe it above, the chips don’t sink. Le voila!
Denise - Oh no! I will fix that, though it doesn’t help you much now. I added the tomato paste but forgot to say where. I believe I just mixed it in right before I stuffed the peppers. I loved the couscous dish, it just needed a little something-something to bind the flavors together. I hope it still came out okay!
Rachael - Was it still good? I bet this cake is pretty flexible and the coffee sounds wonderful, too.
I think the yogurt worked well, though I haven’t had the sour cream so I’m not sure how it would compare (I also did 2tsp baking powder and no soda because I was worried that the yogurt was too acidic). It was definitely sweet…the coffee balanced that out a little bit, but I think next time I’d try the sour cream or plain yogurt.
I had some for breakfast and was just as moist and yummy as the night before (receiving some arched eyebrows from my S.O. when I put a slice on his plate too! Cake for breakfast? But of course!)
Thanks, Deb!! Much appreciated :-)
Wow. I threw this together as a replacement for my raspberry-bottomed cheesecake that is always too heavy after the big meal. And it was more than a hit–it was a sensation. We tucked into it as soon as it cooled Wednesday night, snacked on it throughout Thursday, and were fighting over the crumbs by Friday morning. I’m home from family festivities now and am planning on running out to the store in a bit for the supplies to make another pan, so I can eat it every morning for the rest of my life.
So, basically, thanks for a stupendous recipe!
Wow. This looks delicious. I have 1/2 a tub of sour cream lingering in my refrigerator begging to be used. This is a must-bring to the office especially since it got an A+ at school. :) Thanks for sharing
I made this last week, my first smittenkitchen recipe!!! They were so tasty and my coworkers enjoyed them. It was so easy that I’ll make this a standard treat!
My first Smitten recipe to get made as well, but I think I must have got my conversions to metric a bit off, as the batter was very stiff, and I had enough chocolate chips to feed a small principality. Nice though! Served it with fresh raspberries and some creme chantille for a post BBQ pudding and it was well received. I suspect it should be moister though…
I’ve been reading for awhile yet have never posted until now. Thanks for the great recipes and entertainment on my lunch break! I made this coffee cake over the holidays and it didn’t look at all like the pictures (though the taste was delicious) - it was very cake-like and it rose a bit, and your pictures suggest a denser texture with a shorter profile. I wondered if I had whipped the egg whites too much? Anyway, I’m not complaining in the least (!), it’s a great recipe that I plan to use again, I was just curious. Thanks!!
With that kind of praise, this is going straight to my recipes-to-try list!
Just thought I’d let you know that I’ve made this a couple of times for my roommates and it is a favorite. I cook breakfast every Friday morning, and colossal cheer is the perfect way to describe my roommates’ reaction when they see this in the oven. When I look for breakfast ideas I come here first, and then head over to epicurious if I don’t have the right ingredients to recreate something you’ve made. Anyways, just thought I’d let you know, because one of my roommates grinned as I pulled this out of the oven, “This is my very favorite!” she said.
This looks incredibly good. I think I’ll have to make this!
BTW, your blog is amazing!
Erin
Hi Deb….love your site I think it is cook’s paradise…I would love the make the Choc. chip Sour Cream Cake but I live in Australia and we have different weights so if you could tell me how much a stick of butter is I would appreciate it very much…Keep the good work up and regards from OZ…Pat
Hi Pat — A stick of butter is about 112 grams, 4 ounces or 1/4 pound. Hope that helps!
Hi Deb,
Your food always literally makes me salivate at work - yum! I just wanted to say I tried this cake the other night and it was delicious!!! Very popular with the office, the doorman, the boyfriend, the roommate, and obviously myself. There was a problem with the eggs being beaten to stiff peaks which I chronicled on my blog (um, I tried to do it by hand, enough said), but it was awesome nonetheless! Thanks for the great recipes! (and of course I gave you credit!)
I’m a bit gutted because I thought this was going to be a cake “moment” for me but I foolishly did a bit of substituting and didn’t think hard enough about quantities. so I ended up with a cake that was tasty on the edges and not quite cooked in the centre. This wouldn’t be so bad except I used my stash of chocolate chips which I brought all the way from the states last year and I can’t bear the waste!! However, I will try again and succeed. BTW, although I was unhappy with my cake, several other people ate it and said it was good, so I know that success lies not far away.
I’m jealous of all your pictures by the way, you have a way with light that I have totally failed to master thus far. Onwards and upwards!!
My first smitten kitche recipe. I think it turned out pretty well. My only problem was I think I didn’t portion the dough properly when I put the first layer in, meaning I put too much on the bottom, then layered the chip mixture and when I put the second layer of dough there wasn’t enough to cover the mid layer of chip mixture. I also think next time I make this I want to use mini-chips. The ones I used were just a bit too big. I was just psyched I got to use my new stand mixer three times; once for the dough, once for the egg white and once for the whipped cream I topped it with before serving.