Welcome to Kitchen Queries, where the nigella.com team will answer your cooking or food related questions.  We’d love you to submit some of your recipe problems, dilemmas or queries for us to get our teeth into!

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• Incredibly Easy Chocolate Fruit Cake

  I would like to make Nigella's Incredibly Easy Chocolate Fruit Cake (Christmas, p180) for Christmas. Would my springform pan work for this?

  I would like to make a half-sized version of the Incredibly Easy Chocolate Christmas Cake and would like your advice on quantities and cooking times.

  Posted by Mina. Answered on 9th Dec 2011 at 12.00

  From the nigella team:

  The Incredibly Easy Chocolate Fruit Cake is made in a 20cm/8-inch cake tin with deep sides. A springform pan is ideal, as is a regular, deep loose-bottomed pan. A springform pan is lined in the same way as the deep cake pan. However we would avoid using a sandwich cake pan (for the US this is a regular cake pan) as the sides are too shallow to accomodate the amount of cake batter in the recipe.

  Unfortunately we do not test scaled-down versions of Nigella's cakes so we cannot be particularly accurate. Also scaling down round cakes is not always "linear" which makes quantities and timing more difficult. However, we would guess that a half quantity of the cake batter is more likely to make a 15cm/6-inch cake rather than a 10cm/4-inch one. The baking time is probably going to be 1 to 1 1/4 hours but we would suggest that you start checking after 50 minutes as ovens do vary.

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