Cake! with bittersweet chocolate frosting

I was very pleased with the "Dressy Chocolate Loaf Cake" from Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours. (We have some leftovers: I'll try to remember to take a photo of the next slice I eat.) It's a dark, tight-crumbed sour cream chocolate loaf cake, split into three layers and filled with raspberry jam, then frosted with a particularly good and easy bittersweet chocolate frosting.

The frosting is simplicity itself: rig up a double boiler and melt five ounces of chopped semi-sweet chocolate. Then, still working over the hot water, add half a cup of of room-temperature sour cream. Stir gently until the chocolate and cream are thoroughly combined, glossy, and smooth. That's it: no extra sugar or milk or butter or anything of the adulterating sort. The chocolate may seize up at first if your sour cream is chilly, but if you keep stirring, it will sort itself out.

Then you frost the cake with this icing while it's still warm. It's very easy to work with, plenty to cover a largeish loaf cake, and as it cools it firms up into something dense, fudgy, tangy, and not at all insipid or overly sweet. A+. I was thinking that it would be stylish and tasty to make the same cake with a lemon batter rather than all chocolate. Milk chocolate and lemon are sort of blah together, but (as I learned from Italian gelaterias) dark chocolate and lemon are great, and the raspberry would fit right in. What do you think?

Comments

[aleza]

that lemon/raspberry/dark chocolate combo sounds great to me, and very spring. you could decorate with lemon zest, candied or not, and whole raspberries: both of which would look lovely on the dark chocolate ganache.

i've been making that kind of ganache icing a bunch lately, but with regular cream, heated till simmering, poured over chopped chocolate, and stirred till blended. nice to know that it works with sour cream, too! i made a ganache-iced gingerbread (for a birthday, also!) that i think would take particularly well to the sour cream ganache, the next time around... particularly if i did it in layer cake pans, which a few thin layers of the chocolate.

[redfox]

Oh, I love chocolate with gingerbread. So many cakes, crying out to be made.

[Elsa]

On the strength of your description, I ordered the Dorie Greenspan book from the library for a test drive. This weekend, I'm planning to make dressy chocolate cake and fill it with a layer of marmalade. Oh, yes.

Thanks!

[redfox]

Sounds great! I hope it turned out well. I had thought of finally making the cupcakes last night -- which would have been a good idea, since a friend will be coming over this evening and she could have helped to eat them -- but was too lazy. Soon, soon.

[Tracey]

Has anyone tried the raspberry/lemon/dark chocolate combo that was mentioned? How did it turn out?