Guest Author - Deborah Markus

So many members of my little family have been sick so often this winter that I haven't been doing nearly as much chocolate baking as I generally do. So it was a relief to have my husband, who is so allergic to chocolate that he can't even breathe in the scent of it without suffering an unpleasant reaction, safe at work miles away, and my son quietly on the mend after a couple of days of fever. It was time to bake something.

Brownies are always, always good; but I felt like inventing something. I had sour cream in the fridge, which is unusual around our place, and I had a bag of unsweetened dried cherries from the farmer's market. And both of them wanted some chocolate to snuggle up to.

I've heard of chocolate cake with sour cream as a base ingredient. I did a little poking around in my various cookbooks, old and new, and a little more poking around my cupboard shelves; and I came up with something that pleased me.

Put the kettle on to boil. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a cake pan, round or square (not a long pan, as for a sheet cake -- this doesn't make enough batter for that).

Take a quarter cup of butter and chop it up into smallish slivers. Put it in the bottom of a large mixing bowl, along with a quarter cup of unsweetened powdered cocoa.

When the kettle has come to a boil, measure out half a cup of boiling water and pour it in with the butter and cocoa. Stir thoroughly -- a whisk is good for this -- until the butter has melted and the cocoa powder is completely incorporated. Beat one cup sugar, an egg and a teaspoon of real vanilla extract into the mixture.

In a one- or two-cup glass measuring cup, spoon half a cup of sour cream. Put a teaspoon of baking soda into the cream and stir vigorously. Beat this into the cocoa mixture. Add half a cup unbleached all-purpose flour and one teaspoon baking powder and mix thoroughly.

This is enough to make a wonderful chocolate cake. If you want an extra treat, and a cake good enough to eat plain, stir in a third of a cup of dried cherries and/or a third of a cup of your favorite chocolate chips.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 25 minutes -- start checking after twenty. Remove when a cake tester comes out clean.

If this is a cake to be iced, let it cool thoroughly. If you've gone the extra mile, slice it when it's still a little warm. The chocolate chips will still be gooey, and you won't have to worry about storing leftovers.