Your Chocolate Ganache Is Seriously Missing Sour Cream

Chocolate ganache is pure, spoonable, smearable heaven in a bowl. This creamy, rich, decadent, and devilishly delicious stuff is fantastic as a frosting for your cakes and cupcakes, slathered over your best brownie recipe, and worthy even of eating all by itself.

It's also extremely simple to make, and can be as easy as combining two ingredients — cream and chocolate — along with just a few minutes of your time, and flavorings of your choice if you feel so inclined. But one ingredient you may not have considered could make a major difference in boosting both the taste and texture of your chocolate ganache, and that is sour cream.

This little bit of extra oomph brings a balancing and surprisingly delightful tang to your spreadable cocoa dream, as well as a silky consistency. And once you've mastered this very approachable technique, you'll have no reason not to whip some up to satisfy any whim or sweet culinary need.

Sour cream itself is made when a lactic-producing bacteria is inoculated into cream. The result is a slightly tangy, thickened dairy product, and while it's probably best known for its pairing with baked potatoes and plump, filled pierogies, you can find uses for the dairy product in everything from baking projects to snack dips, soups and sauces.

Enriching ganache with sour cream is a snap, and makes great use of two ingredients that you might already have on hand. Simply melt about 2 cups of chocolate chips (your choice of type or percentage) in a glass bowl over simmering hot water on your stovetop, stirring until you have a smooth liquid and no clumps are left behind. From there, transfer your chocolate to a medium-sized bowl, combine it with about 1 ½ cups of sour cream, and beat with an electric hand mixer until it becomes a silky, well-integrated, spreadable product. From there, it can be used in any recipe that calls for the traditional kind, including chocolate hazelnut heart cakes with blackberry cream and chocolate ganache.

You'll want to work quickly for frosting purposes; as the mixture cools it will become firm. While having set-up ganache is ideal when you want to transport your baked goods, it will make it tricky to spread evenly and cleanly.

Once you've got this method down pat, you can get super creative with how to use this ingredient. Sour cream ganache is a natural fit for chocolate cake, making for layers of rich cocoa flavor, but you can customize freely, and find some surprising uses, too.

Add flavors like extracts, herbs, spices, salts, or even alcohols like bourbon or Irish cream. Experiment by swapping out milk chocolate for dark, or try white or even ruby chocolates. Each one will bring a different personality to your project. Ganache is ideal for decorating, too, given the glossy nature of the finished product, and you can even doctor up lighter-colored chocolate options with a little of your favorite food-safe dyes.

Ganache goes beyond frosting, too. Turn it into poppable truffles, or layer into a trifle with your preferred nut butter and whipped cream. Dip your doughnuts in a layer of ganache and top with sprinkles, or use it as an element in turning your baking scraps into cake pops. No matter how you choose to indulge, you'll never regret learning this sour cream secret.