TWD: Dressy Chocolate Loafcake

This week's TWD recipe, Dressy Chocolate Loaf Cake, got me all excited. It's pretty much the fanciest-sounding dessert I've made all month. How fancy did it sound?

• I put on my finest petticoat and my leather kid gloves just to read the recipe.
• I gave myself a crink in the neck practicing holding my snooty nose high in the air as I ate its Royal Dressiness.
• I scrubbed my apartment and got the carpets steam-cleaned so the cake would have a pristine home
  
• I pictured the finished product sauntering out of the kitchen looking a little something like this:

But, before any of that could happen, I had a not-so-sexy situation during the baking process, that looked a little something like this:


I'm so much of a pastry genius that I sometimes skip steps, either on purpose or because I'm too awesome to bother reading all the directions. In this case, I skimmed past the part where we were supposed to sift the dry ingredients, including the flour and the cocoa powder. I just merrily added them all to the batter unsifted. This might not always be a problem, but my cocoa powder is not powder so much as globules, so the resulting cake batter had big pockets of unincorporated cocoa. NOT DRESSY IN THE LEAST.

What to do? I definitely didn't want to toss the batter and start again--a waste of ingredients! And I didn't want to bake it as-is, because, ew. So I settled for vigorously smooshing the batter through a strainer and stirring it all really well before baking. Never done that one before! It seemed to get rid of the cocoa clumps, but it took about five million times longer than just straining the dry ingredients on their own, so I can't say I really recommend this method.


The cake itself is a chocolate sour cream cake, layered with raspberry jam and finished with chocolate sour cream frosting, one of my very favorites. It really should be finished with fresh raspberries on top, but the Raspberry Fairy hadn't left me any of those in the fridge, so I had a make-it-work moment and used strawberries instead.

I loved the combination of chocolate cake, raspberry jam, and chocolate sour cream frosting. The sweet, tart, chocolately flavors were heavenly together. I didn't love that my cake was a little dry--maybe it was the smooshing and straining, maybe it spent a few extra minutes in the oven. Whatever it was, it made me avoid the edges and just eat the moist innards near the jam. Which is kind of a shame, but if it hadn't had this deficiency I would have eaten a lot more of this cake, which would have been a shame in a different way.

What did you guys think? Dressy Chocolate Loafcake & I are both curious.