Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Coffee Cake

One of my oldest and best friends, Tracie, is visiting me this week. And to welcome her properly I decided to dip into the sweets section and bake a cake. A Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Coffee Cake, to be precise, given to me by my old roommate Lauren and her husband Lee. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is Lee's recipe, as I don't recall Lauren making it when we lived together. That, and I'm also pretty sure it's Lee's handwriting on the recipe. Then again, what do I know?

I was all prepared to wax rhapsodic on Lauren, who she was (is), Lee, who he is, etc. Then something happened: my kitchen got taken over by ants. Lots and lots of ants. Last week, I saw a few of them coming out of my bathroom sink drain. I killed them, plugged up the drain, and they were gone the next day. I thought I'd won.

Oh how wrong I was.

It seems that they were just reconfiguring, planning a new strategy of attack. One that involved my kitchen and lots and lots of their friends. First, there was a swarm of them in the pantry. Only the pantry cabinet and nowhere else. We discovered there were a bunch of them in a bag of peanuts, threw it out, and voila--no more ants! I was delighted.

Until I made Lauren & Lee's coffee cake. You see, we all liked the cake a lot around here at Casa Huntington, but none so much as the mother-effing ants. They found it - under the cheese dome thing it was in - and swarmed it last night. Josh woke up to that lovely sight this morning, and although he threw away the coffee cake (GASP), it's still too late. They have smelled victory and are now pouring out in record numbers inexplicably from behind both pantry cabinets. They are as yet unphased by the ant traps I set in the kitchen for them, nor do they care that I periodically vacuum their brethren up with my fierce Dyson. They just keep sending more and more reinforcements.

Basically, it's a horror show. I asked Josh to go in and de-ant this morning, but he was stressed, complaining of bad karma and an ant holocaust. We just had the pest guy here to flea bomb the house and yard because we have super fleas that the poor dog and cat can't get rid of, and now I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to ask him to declare jihad on the kitchen ants. It's like the 10 goddamn plagues in my house.

In short, it's horrifying, and it's pretty much the only thing I can think of when I think of my kitchen or cooking or anything of that ilk. Which unfortunately means Lauren & Lee & their coffee cake are all going to get way too short shrift. Which is a shame, because all three of them are pretty wonderful.

Let it suffice to say that Lauren is gorgeous and quirky and Lee is hilarious and just a lovely guy, they both are great friends and undoubtedly great parents to their new dumpling Vanessa, and she is lucky that she will get to eat this lovely coffee cake recipe as she grows up. I can only hope that Lauren & Lee gave me another recipe somewhere else in this book so I can give them their proper due on another, less infested day.

As for the coffee cake, it is more cake than coffee cake, although lovely and the chocolate chips are yum. It was easy to make, with one caveat: Bake it in the dish you want to display/keep it in (i.e., like a cute pie dish type thing or something) because I baked mine in a boring brownie pan type thing. It came out of the oven looking perfect. Like this:

Nice.

And then I tried to get it out, and it wound up looking like this:

Uh-oh.

I displayed the nice half for Tracie, and hid the dessicated half for Josh and me. The bad news: the ants ate the good half. The good news: the dessicated half might look like shit, but it still tastes great. And that one was locked safely away in the fridge.

Off to bed, obviously to dream of insects of one form or other.

Lauren & Lee's Ant-astic Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Coffee Cake

6 tbsp butter
1 cup + 1 tbsp sugar
2 eggs
1 1/3 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 cup sour cream
1 pkg chocolate chips (8 ozs, or 11.5 ozs if you're me)

Cream butter & sugar. Add eggs. Stir flour and other dry ingredients together. Blend in. Add sour cream. Pour into greased 9" x 13" pan. Scatter chocolate chips over batter. Sprinkle with tbsp of sugar over top. Bake at 350 for 35 minutes.

Do not screw anything up. Then, after cake has cooled, try to get it out of the pan and have it come to ruinous pieces before your eyes. Manage to salvage half of it. Put said half under cheese dome in counter, which is evidently a siren song to ants. Wish you knew that part beforehand.