Chocolate Fruit Cake

Our answer

Nigella's Chocolate Fruit Cake (from Feast and on the Nigella website) is a great last-minute Christmas cake as it is very moist and does not require maturing or feeding. The recipe uses Tia Maria as the coffee helps to amplify the chocolate flavour in the cake. You can use freshly brewed coffee as a non-alcoholic alternative. Extra orange juice is another possibility, though it will give the cake a slight hint of chocolate orange. If you wanted to use an alternative liqueur then rum, or brandy, would be good alternatives.

The cake tends to sink a little in the centre so Nigella prefers to decorate the cake with edible gold dragees, stars and glitter. However if you did want a more traditional icing then you would need to turn the cake upside down, to give a flat top, before covering it in marzipan and icing. As it is a moist cake we would suggest icing the cake as late as possible as there is a bigger risk of the moisture seeping through and discolouring part of the icing.

The cake is of a type called "boiled fruit cake" as the fruits are boiled up with the butter and liquid ingredients at the start of the recipe. This means that they do not need to soak for days beforehand. The mixture should be left to cool so that the eggs do not cook as soon as they are added to the mixture. This usually takes about 30 minutes, though if you need to leave the mixture to cool for longer that is fine and up to 3 hours should be fine as the boiled mixture does not contain any particularly perishable ingredients.

Unfortunately we have not tried this cake in cupcake/muffin form. However in Nigella's book Feast she has a recipe for Jewelled Cupcakes which are cupcake forms of the Easy-Action Christmas Cake and you may like to try this recipe instead. The cakes are baked in gold foil cupcake cases.