Cake #6 Mile High Chocolate Cake a la Sher

Basic ingredients. Rough cost outside the pantry ~$12 for the chocolate and sour cream & butter.
I employed the double boiler method of melting the chocolate and butter. Pyrex bowl on top of 2 qt sauce pan with 2 inches of water at the bottom. My bowl was too small to mix it quickly. I had to be careful.
Standing mixer whipping butter & sugar. Sifted dry goods waiting to be added. Melted chocolate is cooling to be added (separate from the melted chocolate from the frosting - good thing I started this at 7:30 am.
The batter in the pan. It was like mousse - though it looks a bit like cow pie when photographed...sorry.
And, disaster # 1 strikes the cakes. Of course this one is for public consumption. I think I cooked a few minutes too long. I also did not take the cakes out of the pans after 10 minutes as instructed, more like 30 (oops, didn't see that direction until too late). And, I was a bit hasty loosening with the knife. Well, yeah they were crumbly. I kept all the parts and planned to frosting-glue them back together.
Taking Mindy's advice, I put the cakes in the fridge to cool/freeze before slicing them in half. I have a wire cake cutter. Why, pray tell, did I not use it? Why did it call for a long serrated knife? Mine did not look long enough, and I expected problems with the crumbly cake. Well, if Alton Brown had ever thought cutting a cake with an ELECTRIC KNIFE was a good idea, I am sure he would have put it on TV already - so why was I thinking I needed to forge a new frontier? Completely uneven. Completely crumbly. Completely hilarious though. Oy vey, and it's not just family coming to dinner either.
I like this contrast of the inner disaster and what can be done to cover it up with a WHOLE LOTTA frosting. We used every lick. Yup 6 sticks of butter.
I also liked Mindy's money shot with the ruler. And the picture below gives a little perspective on how TALL this cake is - looked like a top hat.
Happy Birthday! Finally an interior shot of the cake. Smiling at the layers.

More like 0.00009th of a Mile High Cake. Yes, I did the math. Ben graciously selected one of our 30 cakes for his birthday cake. Good thing he and Chris both like chocolate, since they had the same cakes for their birthdays. This was a very chocolate cake. As Mindy mentioned, it was not too sweet, maybe because it called for unsweetened chocolate and unsweetened cocoa. It almost had a quality of a really dry wine that sucks the moisture from your mouth and begs to be eaten with some vanilla ice cream.

This was not quite a "pantry cake", but was close, just had to have 2 CUPS of sour cream on hand as well as many ounces of "high quality" unsweetened dark chocolate. Ours was the highest quality that Shaw's offers, but that's not really saying too much. And we usually have butter on hand, but this cake called for so much, it wiped out our fridge supply!

I was very happy to have the wisdom of Mindy's lessons learned before attempting this. I had to make it on the day we were eating it. I can usually safeguard against many pitfalls by baking the day before frosting. This cake requires a lot of cooling. For the cake before frosting, and for the frosting itself before combining. Cooling = time. Usually time we do not have. You can't hurry up and cool something.

This cake is funny tall. Taller than it is wide. Too tall for my cake dome. Too tall for the plates we used. Had to carry it on my lap in the car, uncovered, just to get it to the party - had visions of a blog post of me on the ground, my face in the cake atop a pile of leaves on the walkway to the house.

Truthfully, I did not like the cake. Not worth the effort for the payoff. But, Ben LOVED the cake. Both the crumble and the frosting. LOVED the frosting. He wouldn't say that just to be nice. Not to me anyway. Reminded me that everyone has different tastes. His happens to Heart the 0.00009 Mile High Cake.