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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• Round to Square Fruit Cake

  Hi! I am making Nigella's Christmas Cake for my parent's 50th wedding anniversary and I want to use a 10 inch square tin. Can you give me an idea of the quantity of ingredients? Thanks.

  Posted by Highlake. Answered on 10th May 2012 at 12.00

  From the nigella team:

  Nigella's classic fruit cake recipes in both Feast and Christmas have tables for 3 different sizes of cake, but to start you need to work out the round tin equivalent for your square tin as most cake recipes give tin sizes for round tins. As a rule of thumb, you take the square tin measurement and add 2.5cm/1 inch to this to get the round tin equivalent. 

  So in the case of a 25cm/10-inch a square tin you will need a recipe that fits a 28cm/11-inch round tin. If you can't find the appropriate recipe for a 28cm/11-inch tin then we would suggest using 1 1/4 x a 25cm/10-inch round cake recipe - however we would like to point out that we have not tested this, it is our best guess at the likely quantities.

  We would follow the baking instructions for the 10-inch round tin, starting the oven at 150c/300F for 1 hour then reducing it to 140c/275F for the remaining time and allowing betwen 20 minutes and 1 hour extra baking time. When the cake is done it will be firm on top and a cake tester will come out clean.

  As the sharper edges of a square cake tin can also burn more easily, we would suggest giving the tin a quarter turn in the oven every 30 minutes. Do this carefully, using oven gloves.

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