I’ve had my eye on the chocolate chip coffee cake that Madeline wrote about a few weeks back. It sounded so good. And although I HATE sour cream with a passion, I decided to give it a try on Sunday. The few recipes that have caught my eye on Everything Rachael Ray have been really good, so I figured this would be a cinch for a yummy hot Sunday breakfast.

The morning started out as okay as can be — I got up, let the dogs out, got Will up and set out to make breakfast. Everything was going fine. I softened the butter, creamed it with the sugar and set about to mix in the eggs.

Note to Self #1: DO NOT TRY TO CARRY TWO EGGS IN ONE HAND WHILE PREGNANT.

Clumsy me (and yes, I am BLAMING it on being pregnant) dropped one of the eggs, spilling some juices into the fridge and the rest onto my kitchen floor. AWESOME. But it cleaned up quickly and I went about cooking.

Note to Self #2: DO NOT TRY TO ADD AN EGG TO THE MIXER WHILE IT’S ON, WHILE PREGNANT.

It must have been clumsy me adding the first egg to the mixer because I slipped and dropped the shell in while it was whirling — crunch, crunch, crunch.

Back to the old drawing board. I considered giving up at this point, but I was completely unwilling to let some coffee cake outwit me. So I forged on, started over, learned from my mistakes and got the darn thing in the oven.

This better be good.

About five minutes into cooking, I realized that I forgot an ingredient — baking soda. Fortunately it also has baking powder so I just hoped for the best. The cooking time was 30-35 minutes, at 32 minutes I checked it — not done. I set the timer for another 4 minutes. Still not done. I set it for another 12 minutes, since it was REALLY not cooked yet.

Why won’t this darned thing cook?

All I could remind myself was that at least it smells good (and if I can ever EAT it, I bet it will taste good too). When the timer went off, I had high hopes . . . and it was much further along. Just not done yet. Another four minutes.

This thing better be done now.

Finally, the knife (cake tester) came out clean. I didn’t even wait more than a minute before slicing it up and calling everyone to eat. Tasty? Yes. Worth making it again? Yes. I just wish I knew why this took me close to an hour to cook . . .

You can check out the recipe here. If you try it, let me know how long it takes you to cook it.

The few notes I have are:

• try substituting the 1/4 cup of sugar for 1/4 cup of brown sugar in the topping (and maybe adding a tbsp or two of flour).
• try using dark chocolate chips instead of semisweet
• don’t expect the timer to tell you when the coffee cake is done

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Chocolate is high in antioxidants, making this a great post for Sweetnicks‘ ARF/5-a-Day Tuesdays.