What Quantity Of Ingredients Do I Need For A Square Chocolate Fruit Cake?

Our answer

Nigella's Chocolate Fruit Cake (from FEAST) is great for any time of year but is particularly popular as an alternative to a more traditional rich fruit Christmas cake. One of the advantages is that it does not need to mature, so can be eaten almost immediately. So you may want to bear this in mind if you are planning for Christmas, as we would suggest making the cake around 2 weeks ahead of Christmas.

A 23cm square tin usually equates to a 25cm round cake tin and for a 25cm round tin you would need 1.5x the recipe quantities. So you would need 1.5x the recipe quantities for a 23cm square tin also. Cake scaling is not always exact, but as fruit cakes don't rise that much and bake at a lower temperature, the risk is slightly lower. It is difficult to estimate the baking time, but it is likely to be 2-2.5 hours. And it is worth mentioning that the angular corners of square cakes can darken more easily, so you should rotate the pan during the baking time. We would suggest rotating the pan 180 degrees (a half turn) after the first 1.5 hours of cooking. Check the cake after 2 hours and if it needs longer cooking then leave for 15 minutes, check again and rotate the pan again, if further cooking is necessary. The cake is baked when it a cake tester inserted into the centre comes out clean or with just a few damp cake crumbs on it (but not uncooked cake batter).