Can I Exclude The Raw Eggs From The All Purpose Chocolate Icing?

Our answer

Nigella's recipe for All-Purpose Chocolate Icing from HOW TO BE A DOMESTIC GODDESS) is a mixture of melted chocolate, butter, eggs and icing sugar that is flavoured with rum and vanilla. The eggs give additional richness to the icing as well as a voluptuous texture, but raw eggs are not suitable for everyone. We suspect that you could replace the two eggs with 110g (8 tablespoons/1 stick) extra melted butter, but we have not tried this ourselves so can't guarantee the results.

We would instead suggest trying some of the other chocolate icings that Nigella has used on some of her cakes. The chocolate icing on the Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake uses similar ingredients but instead of eggs it uses sour cream. The icing from the Chocolate Fudge Cake is a simpler mixture of melted chocolate, icing sugar and butter. In both of the recipes the icing is enough to cover the top, middle and sides of a 20cm/8-inch two layer cake and you can add a splash of dark rum to each as well, if you like.