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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• Italian Christmas Pudding Cake

  I am planning to make Nigella's Italian Christmas Pudding cake in late January. I'd like to know which kind of marsala you suggest, dry or sweet?

  Posted by pollyy. Answered on 24th Jan 2013 at 12.00

  From the nigella team:

  When cooking with marsala wine we would generally prefer to use dry marsala for savoury dishes and sweet marsala for desserts. For the Italian Christmas Pudding Cake we would recommend the sweet (dolce) marsala. In the UK sweet marsala seems to be easier to find in supermarkets than dry marsala. If you can't find sweet marsala then you could probably use a sweet Madiera wine as an alternative.

  As marsala a fortified wine, with a higher alcoholic content than table wine, it keeps very well and is a useful storecupboard item. Keep the bottle tightly stoppered and in a cool dark place. It is probably best used up in 4 to 5 months but can keep longer.

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