While rummaging through the clearance aisle at Wal-Mart, I found a mini bundt pan for sale. Thinking that they would be a nice addition to my growing collection of baking gear, I purchased it and immediately went home to find a recipe to bake. The perfect one to test came in the form of the Dark Chocolate Cake recipe at the TheKitchn. I tweaked the recipe a bit, and the results are below.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup reduced-fat sour cream
  
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 ounce semisweet chocolate, broken into pieces
  
• 1 cup boiling water

I preheated the oven to 350 degrees F and sprayed a 6-cup mini bundt pan and a 9x9 in square cake pan with Baker's Joy no-stick spray with flour.

Using a stand mixer, I stirred together the sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt until the powder mixture was a uniform brown. Then I added the eggs, sour cream, milk, vegetable oil, and vanilla. Next, I beat all of this on medium speed for 2 minutes. While mixer was whirring, I dropped pieces of the semisweet chocolate into the cup of boiling water to melt. Once the chocolate was dissolved and the 2 minutes was up, I mixed the boiling water into the batter. It's really important that the chocolate be broken into small pieces to make for easy melting; I learned this the hard way. I ended up dumping murky hot water and a gooey clump of chocolate into the batter in hopes that the chocolate would finish melting with some heavy duty mixing.

I poured the thin batter into prepared pans and baked the 9x9 in baking pan for 28 minutes while the mini bundt pan stayed in the oven for 32 minutes. The latter had to bake for a longer time because I overfilled the cups. Then I cooled the cakes for 10 minutes before removing them from the pans.

Instead of having relatively flat bottoms, the bundt cakes ended up with fluffy, rounded tops. This isn't the traditional look for bundt cakes, but I kind of liked it. The cakes were like big cupcakes with a flower-like bottom (as pictured above). Appearances aside, the cakes were a great success. My parents and I enjoyed them immensely and liked how they weren't too sweet like cakes that you find in stores. One of my friends, however, could have done with some chocolate chips or chunks dispersed throughout the cakes to up the sweetness and flavor factor. I will have to take that into consideration for next time.