After explaining to my husband that no, I wasn’t actually keeping six jars of foaming wallpaper paste in the kitchen, I decided that something had to be done about the sourdough starter before it exploded and took over the whole house.

See, when you keep a starter, you have to discard some and feed the rest. I hate to throw something away when I’ve spent time trying to keep it functioning, so the starter was not only growing, it was breeding. Time to spring into action and come up with something yummy.

Having scoured various sites for sourdough discard pointers, I came up with something that will please kids and adults alike. If you don’t have an established sourdough starter, you can hit up one of your baking buddies or try one of the many how-tos that are available online.

Chocolate Sourdough Cake

Ingredients

1 cup “discard” sourdough starter

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup milk

1 1/4 cups sugar

3/4 cup vegetable oil

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 cup cocoa

2 eggs

Directions

Combine the starter, milk and flour in a bowl and stir thoroughly. Cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave it alone for a few hours.

When you’re ready to bake, crank up your oven to 350 F and grease a 9-by-13 cake pan. Put the sugar, oil and vanilla extract into your stand mixer bowl and whirl it around until it loses some of the gritty scraping sound. Stir the salt, baking soda, cinnamon and cocoa together with a fork, then add that mix to the sugar mix.

Add the eggs, one at a time, and blend well after each addition. The whole mess should be looking a lot less like chocolate sand now.

Your starter mix should be well-developed by this point, so go ahead and scrape the whole glob into your mixer bowl. Trying to pour and blend will only result in large sheets of Super Gluten wrapping themselves around your beaters, causing you to cry.

Or so I’ve heard.

Beat everything together on medium until just blended, and then pour it into your prepared pan. Shove it in the oven right away; you can probably see the baking soda reacting already, sending little bubbles to the top of the batter. Bake your cake for 32 to 40 minutes, or until it passes the toothpick test. Set the pan on a rack to cool.

This is a nice, moist cake with lots of chocolate flavor, but not too much “sweet.” If you’re a sugar bug, you can frost it or dust the top with powdered sugar. If you’re a chocolate purist, this cake tastes best with nothing more than a glass of cold milk as an accompaniment. As an added bonus, the sourdough helps the cake stay fresh for several days; just cover the pan in foil and snack from it as the urge hits you.

Enjoy!

— Have a question or suggestion for Bite Sighs? Email Audrey Lintner at bitesighs@hotmail.com.