This easy chocolate loaf cake recipe is made with sour cream and cocoa powder for a deep chocolate flavour with a tender crumb. This is a great cake to slice for snacks or to serve with ice cream and berries for a more elegant, yet simple dessert!
The perfect chocolate loaf cake should be moist, with a bouncy, tender crumb inside, but should be sturdy and dense enough to hold together when sliced so that you can wrap slices as snacks for later.
For this chocolate loaf cake, I stuck to the classic 1-2-3-4 recipe which I love for bundt cakes. This is a baking ratio that is by volume, not by weight, so for 1 cup butter, you add 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, and 4 eggs (note: 4 eggs is not a volume but still, makes it easier to remember 1-2-3-4).
The full 1-2-3-4 recipe is too much to fit a standard 9x5" loaf pan, so this loaf cake is half of that, meaning ½ cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 ½ cups flour and 2 eggs.
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What You Need to Make This Chocolate Cake
In this recipe, you will notice that the chocolate loaf cake is made with cocoa powder instead of melted dark chocolate. There are a few reasons why you would use cocoa powder instead of dark chocolate to make a chocolate cake:
- cocoa powder is 100 % cocoa solids, whereas dark chocolate usually is around 70–75% cocoa (less for semisweet chocolate). This means when you bake with dark chocolate, you would be adding less cocoa solids overall.
- dark chocolate has sugar added and sometimes dairy and other ingredients for flavour. This means when you bake with dark chocolate, you are adding more sugar to the recipe and less cocoa solids, actually.
- butter—I developed this recipe with unsalted butter. If using salted butter, you may want to adjust the salt in the recipe to avoid the cake being too salty
- sugar—you will need both white granulated sugar and light brown sugar. You can swap one for theother and the results will be similar
- eggs—this recipe was developed and tested with large eggs. If you use smaller or larger eggs, this may impact the texture of the final cake
- vanilla—I bake with pure vanilla extract (Kirkland brand from Costco)
- cocoa powder—I bake with Dutch-processed cocoa powder and tested this recipe with a cheaper grocery store cocoa powder (Fry's cocoa powder) as well as a higher quality, more expensive cocoa powder (Extra Brute cocoa powder by Cacao Barry). Both worked perfectly
- boiling water—you will need boiling water to bloom the cocoa powder
- sour cream—please use full-fat sour cream (14 % fat) for the best flavour and texture. Do not use low-fat or it may impact how moist the cake is. Sour cream also provides acidity which leads to a tender crumb. I really love the texture and flavour that sour cream brings to cake
- flour—I bake with bleached all-purpose flour but unbleached will likely work fine here
- leavening agents—you will need both baking powder and baking soda. Please read about baking soda versus baking powder if you do not know the difference
- salt—I bake with Diamond Crystal Fine Kosher salt. If using regular table salt, you may want to halve the amount to avoid the cake being too salty.
Please see the recipe card for the exact ingredients and quantities
Substitutions and Variations
- Sour cream—I prefer to bake with full-fat sour cream but you can try full-fat Greek yogurt instead
How To Make This Chocolate Sour Cream Loaf Cake
While I love using the two-bowl mixing method (also called the muffin method) for my favourite eggless chocolate cake which I use for layer cakes, for this chocolate loaf cake, I prefer to use a traditional creaming method with either a stand mixer or
Step 1—Start by combining the cocoa powder with boiling water in a small boil (or a glass measuring cup) (image 1). Use a whisk to mix the two together to create a smooth, pudding-like consistency (image 2). Set aside for later.
Step 2—Cream the butter and sugars in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment (image 3) and mix until light and fluffy before adding the eggs and vanilla (image 4), and then the sour cream and bloomed cocoa powder (image 5).
Tip: Beat the mixture really well and scrape down the bowl at every stage to ensure all the ingredients are mixed and nothing is stuck to the sides.
Step 3—Sift the dry ingredients over the mixer bowl using a sieve (image 6) to ensure there are no lumps (image 7) then stir them in until you have a thick, fluffy chocolate cake batter (image 8).
Step 4—Transfer the chocolate sour cream cake batter to a prepared loaf cake pan, smoothing out the top (image 9) and bake until the cake begins to pull away from the sides of the pan (image 10). Transfer the cake to a wire rack to cool completely once firm (approximately 10–15 minutes after taking it out of the oven).
Baking With Cocoa Powder Baking Tip: Bloom the Cocoa Powder
When baking with cocoa powder, one of the tricks many professional bakers recommend is to combine it with boiling water. The resulting "melted cocoa" looks a lot like melted dark chocolate or a dark chocolate pudding. The hot water helps to bring out the flavour in the dry powder, which many bakers claim results in a cake with a stronger chocolate flavour.
Since I wanted to add cocoa powder dissolved in hot water, I added a little less sour cream in the final recipe to balance out the extra liquid.
I actually tried adding up to double the sour cream to no avail. The ½ cup sour cream in the recipe cannot be increased, even a little, or else the resulting ratio of dry to wet ingredients will be off. The cake will not bake properly and collapse, leaving a gummy, dense interior.
Chocolate Loaf Cake FAQs
Make sure to check if your cake is done with a cake tester and a thermometer (internal temperature around 212 ºF or 100 ºC when baked).
If your chocolate loaf cake doesn't spend enough time in the oven, the inside will not be fully baked, which will lead to some collapsing. The collapsed area will be more dense and possibly even gummy. Make sure to use a thermometer and a cake tester to know the middle is baked completely before pulling it out of the oven. Another option is if you mismeasured the ingredients, using less dry ingredients and/or more wet ingredients, throwing off the ratio of the recipe.
If your cake collapsed, it's probably under-baked. There are many more reasons for why cakes sink, but this is usually the culprit.
If your chocolate loaf cake is dry and you are sure that you measured your ingredients properly, it may be over-baked. One reason could be that you are baking the cake in a darker metal pan that is absorbing more heat. If you are baking in a dark pan, drop the oven temperature by 25 ºF.
If your loaf cake stuck to the pan and you couldn't get it out, is it possible that you let it cool too long in the pan? I recommend letting loaf cakes cool about 10 minutes, just enough to allow the cake to firm up, but not so much that the edges become stuck to the pan.
If this happens, you can pop the pan back into a warm oven for 10 minutes, not long enough to bake it, but enough to warm the metal of the pan enough so that the butter melts and the cake should slide out.
Also review this on how to prepare cake pans for baking. I recommend buttering and flouring the pan and lining the bottom with parchment. For chocolate cakes, replace the flour on the pan with sifted cocoa powder.
Serving Suggestions
This chocolate loaf cake makes a great lunchbox dessert or snack, but you can also dress it up. Serve it with vanilla bean ice cream, dark chocolate ice cream, cookie ice cream, cardamom ice cream or spiced chai ice cream and summer berries, and you can also drizzle it with salted caramel sauce if you prefer!
Other Chocolate Recipes
If you love chocolate as much as I do, check out these other chocolate baking recipes for more inspiration:
If you tried this recipe for the best chocolate loaf cake (or any other recipe on my website), please leave a ⭐ star rating and let me know how it went in the comments below. I love hearing from you!
📖 Recipe
Chocolate Loaf Cake
Ingredients
- 190 grams bleached all-purpose flour
- 2.5 mL baking powder
- 2.5 mL Diamond Crystal fine kosher salt
- 1.25 mL baking soda
- 50 grams Cacao Barry extra brute cocoa powder
- 80 mL boiling water
- 115 grams unsalted butter
- 100 grams granulated sugar
- 100 grams light brown sugar
- 2 large egg(s)
- 125 mL sour cream (14% fat)
- 5 mL pure vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 °F (175 °C). Butter and dust with cocoa powder an 8½x4½-inch (21.5x11.5 cm) loaf pan OR a 9x5-inch (23x12.5 cm) loaf pan. Line the bottom with a rectangle of parchment paper. Set aside.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. If the flour seems lumpy, you can sift it through a metal sieve to get out all the lumps!
- In a small bowl, using a whisk, combine the cocoa powder and the boiling water until it is smooth. The consistency will be like thick melted chocolate or pudding. Set aside to cool down slightly before using.
- In a large bowl, using an electric hand mixer or in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and sugars for at least 5 minutes until light and fluffy. Be sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl often to make sure the mixture is evenly whipped.
- Add the eggs, one at a time, and the vanilla, mixing in between each addition and scraping down the bowl as needed.
- Add the sour cream and bloomed cocoa mixture. Mix it in until all the ingredients are evenly mixed.
- Sift the flour mixture over top and stir it in on low. You may want to finish mixing with a spatula to make sure the ingredients are all combined.
- Transfer the chocolate loaf cake batter to the prepared loaf pan. Bake the cake on the middle rack until baked through. You'll know it's done because it will have cracked a little in the middle, it will pull away from the edges of the pan, a cake tester will come out clean, and the internal temperature will register around 100 °C (212 °F). It takes about 60 to 70 minutes to bake this cake in my experience.
- Let the cake cool in the pan for 15 minutes before you unmould it onto a wire rack to cool completely before slicing (at least 2 to 3 hours).
- Serve plain as a snack, or top with vanilla bean ice cream or whipped cream and fresh berries.
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