Chocolate Chip Birthday Cake

My roommate generously offered to bake her special family recipe birthday cake with my 5 year old son this weekend. He was sad he wasn't invited to her birthday party (it featured lazor lights and started at 10pm). So the plan was to celebrate her birthday by helping her make the cake.  She had him at "cake."

Well, the weekend got away from us all and on Sunday night, I can see my son really wants his cake (even if he can't have the celebration). I text my roommate for the recipe and I get exactly what she said: a family recipe for special cake.  Which is to say, half a recipe that assumes you have eaten the cake or watched it being prepared many, many times.

The caveat - I have not eaten or seen this cake before. I'm vaguely aware that it is "coffee-ish" and that is has sour cream. I will freely admit to being a well below average baker. I mostly bake for my son and he doesn't seem to care, so I get away with a lot. So here we go!!

Sour cream batter

So good, so far

The batter came out well. I took creaming butter and sugar more seriously than probably ever before.   I even switched blades on my Kitchen Aid after watching a youtube on the subject.  Let's look at the recipe thus far:

1c sugar
3/4 c butter
2.5 c ap flour
1 c sour cream
2 eggs
1 t double acting baking powder
1 t baking soda
1 t vanilla 

Preheat oven 350. Grease pan. 
Beat sugar & 1/2 cup butter til fluffy. Add 2 cups flour & next 5 ingredients. Beat at low til blended. Increase to med beat 3 mins. With spoon stir in .5 cup choc chips. Spread batter in Pan

It doesn't say what kind of pan because that would have been obvious to anyone seeing the cake before. But.. I haven't. I am blind baking. I'm like the beginning of a YA novel in which a mysterious and half finished recipe transports a young bakress to a post-apocalyptic yet magical land of tyrants and tiaras.

Spoiler: It's a bundt cake. No, I did not know that when it went into the oven.

Crumble topping

Once I get my pretty batter into the 9 X 9 pan (I took a guess) it's on to the second part of the recipe.

6 oz choc chips
.5 c light brown sugar
1.5 t cocoa
Med bowl. .5 cup flower, brown sugar, cocoa, add in butter & choc chips. You know the rest.

You know the rest???  Hmmm.

Haha so here's where it gets fun. I really have no clue what to do here. Bowl, check. Ingredients, check. Ummm..guys?

I decide this is a crumb topping because I recall coffee cake being used to describe the cake.  I pastry cut the butter into a cocoa/brown sugar mixture and sprinkle it on top.  Is this right? I have no idea. Probably not because when I took it out of the oven most of the topping just fell off.  Maybe I should have melted the butter.

Pretty yummy!

Voila! Here is the final cake. It was...ok! Jonathan had a piece and scarfed it down. His "helping" during the process consisted entirely of sitting in the other room playing legos and asking if it was done yet.  Helping!

My thanks to L for the cooking adventure  I am very much looking forward to eating the real version some other time. But until then... go forward unto the darkness, bravely the vagueness of family recipes and fly pretty bird, fly! fly!