Can I Make The Quadruple Chocolate Loaf Into A Round Cake?

Our answer

Nigella's Quadruple Chocolate Loaf Cake (from FEAST) is a squidgy chocolate cake that is studded with morsels of chocolate and soaked with a chocolate-flavoured syrup. It is baked in a 900g/2-lb loaf pan.

The capacity of this size of pan is around 1.9 litres, which means that in theory the cake mixture is enough to fill a 20cm/8-inch springform pan. However, this would give a fairly deep cake so it may be worth using a 23cm/9-inch springform pan instead to give a wider but shallower base to a tiered cake. Grease the pan well and line the base with baking parchment. You may also want to line the side of the pan with a strip of parchment, to ensure that the cake unmoulds easily. We would estimate a baking time of between 45 minutes and 1 hour, but keep an eye on the cake and it is baked when a cake tester inserted into the centre comes out clean or with a few damp crumbs attached (but not uncooked cake batter). We would mention that the top of the cake is very likely to crack and the cake may sink slightly in the centre in round form. Also, as it is quite moist, the cake will not bear weight well so you would need to use plenty of dowels. As it is for a special occasion, we would suggest doing a trial run of the cake in round form as unfortunately we have not tried it this way ourselves and are unable to guarantee the results.