hi All

I'm doing a cake tonight for my brothers 30th birthday on Sat, its a corset with boobies cake (except sub the corset for a football shirt !) and I was going to do a maderia with buttercream filling but his GF informs me that Chocolate cake with Fudge filling is his fave and now im a bit stuck!!!

Is there a chocolate cake receipie that is firm enough to be calved without crumbling/breaking?

Is it possible to just use my madera recepie and sub some of the flour for cocco powder, or something for melted chocolate?

Does chocolate even taste nice with fondant icing on it? If it doesnt I will just do a madera cake with Fudge filling!

Finally does anyone know how to convert the US cup measurents to UK measurements, ie 1 cup = ??? grammes/Oz?

Im going to the supermarket in about 6 hours so really really would appreciate any replies by then if at all possible.

Cheers

i use a victoria sponge recipie (it does carve), and would just replace a bit of flour with cocoa, i imagine the same logic applies to maderia.
some of ur recipie books might inclde conversions, otherwise ask.com is a good place to find the answers.
fondant and chocolate is good, you could always make chocolate clay instead if you have time, but i like the regular fondant too anyway.
xx

This site has some conversions:

http://allrecipes.com/HowTo/Baking-Ingredient-Conversions/Detail.aspx

As for chocolate cake you could sub in cocoa - I swap about 25g per 200g flour. You could add melted dark chocolate too - melt then allow to cool then add with wet ingredients (eg when adding eggs if using a creaming method). It will make the cake denser and moist but it won't rise as much so you may need to bake more cake.

HTH

This cake is fabulous and carves very well (without being dry like Madeira), and all the people who've had it LOVE it:

http://cakecentral.com/cake_recipe-2270-Chocolate-Buttercake-by-Nati.html

I have used chocolate soya milk in this as well as plain, both fab (and don't let the soya milk put you off - most things soya based make me want to vomit, but this cake is definitely an exception!).

Here is a link to a fabulous chocolate mudcake. My sister made it and it was delicious! It is a dense cake that a lot of Aussie Cake Decorators seem to use. As the recipe is from Australia, it is already in metric measurements
http://www.cakesandmore.org/forums/showthread.php?tid=90