Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake Fondant Icing

Asked by NSeoighe. Answered on 17th July 2014

Full question

Firstly I would like to know if the Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake is suitable for covering in buttercream icing and then in fondant? Secondly I was thinking of doubling the recipe and cooking in two 10 inch cake tins to make a bigger cake. Do you think this would work and if so, how long should I cook the cakes for? Thanks.

Our answer

Nigella's Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake (from Feast and on the Nigella website) should be robust enough to hold a thin layer of buttercream and a thin layer of rolled fondant icing.The Devil's Food Cake (from Kitchen and on the Nigella website) would also be suitable for this type of decoration. However neither would not be suitable for carving into novelty cakes as you would need a slightly firmer and denser cake (such as a Madiera type sponge) for this.

The cake recipe is enough for a 20cm/8-inch cake baked in two sandwich pans (cake pans). Unfortunately we have not scaled up this recipe so we regret that we are unable to give any particular guidelines or advice for either quantities or baking times for a larger cake. However you may like to check on-line as there are a few websites on the internet that give advice on how to scale up cake quantities.