"Every college student needs a Bundt pan," my mother said sarcastically as she watched me pack. She should have known I would take this as a challenge.

And I did. When I arrived at school, I immediately began fretting over what recipe I should use to christen my new pan. Coffee cake, maybe? Gingerbread? Too pedestrian.

I wanted something with style, something with oomph. I wanted a prince among pastries, a cake that would make Marcella Hazan rip up her numerous cookbooks and cry out in despair.

Unfortunately, the hunt for this elusive perfect cake continues, but the one I chose to make in the first week of school was delicious. This week's recipe is a chocolate cake from my childhood, adapted almost entirely from a great book by Amanda Hesser, a former New York Times food critic. Hesser calls it the "dump-it cake."

My mom used to make this cake on my birthday and sometimes just for fun. It's incredibly easy, and has a surprisingly light consistency.

Don't be turned off by the icing: sour cream might sound like an odd base for a frosting, but so does cream cheese, and everybody knows that goes with carrot cake. I hope you all enjoy what I've found to be a consistently satisfying treat.

Ingredients:

2 cups sugar

4 ounces unsweetened chocolate

1/4 pound unsalted butter (1 stick), plus more for greasing the pan

1 cup water

2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting the pan

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 healthy teaspoon kosher salt

1 cup milk

1 teaspoon cider vinegar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

11/2 cups Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips

11/2 cups sour cream, at room temperature

Step One:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Next, dump the sugar, unsweetened chocolate, butter, and water into a saucepan over medium heat. Stir occasionally until all the ingredients have melted. Then remove the pan from the heat and let cool.

Step Two:

In a mixing bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. In another bowl, stir the milk and vinegar together.

Step Three:

Whisk the milk mixture and eggs into the (now cool) chocolate mixture. Then mix in the dry ingredients in four parts. Be sure not to over-mix, or your cake will come out very dense. When this is done, mix in the vanilla. Grease your bundt pan with butter, then sprinkle it with a little flour.

Step Four:

Pour the batter into the greased pan and slide it onto the middle rack of your oven. Cook until a toothpick poked into the cake's center comes out clean, just about 30 minutes.

Let the cake cool for 10 minutes, then remove from the pan and cool on a rack. To remove from the pan, place a plate over the pan, invert, and then bang on the pan until the cake falls out. If you greased the pan well enough, this should be easy. Now let the cake cool completely.

Step Five:

Melt the chocolate chips in another saucepan, then let the chocolate cool until they have reached room temperature. This step is very important, because if the chocolate and sour cream are not the same temperature, the icing will turn out very lumpy.

Stir in the sour cream, 1/4 cup at a time, until the mixture is smooth. Then ice the cake with a spatula or knife, or some combination of thee two. Serve in generous portions and enjoy!