The great chocolate cake disaster

First there was the Great Chocolate Nemesis debacle. Amateur chefs still remember the infamous recipe in the River Café Cook Book for a chocolate pudding which, no matter how hard one tried, always turned out looking like chocolate sludge instead of the delicious confection described.

Now the Domestic Goddess has fallen into the same trap. Nigella Lawson's new book, Feast, features a recipe for Chocolate Orange Cake. Anyone trying to make it at home, however, is in danger of turning out a gooey mess.

The way Nigella tells it, the cake sounds rather delicious. She says there is something about its "citrussy wetness" and lightness "that makes this perfect to toy with over a cup of coffee at the end of an evening".

Now, Nigella knows something about cake. This is a woman who, on her TV shows, likes nothing better than running her finger round the mixing bowl, then giving it a good lick as she pouts at the camera; indeed, a woman who is cheerfully frank about her fondness for cake.

But a certain confusion seems to have crept into the Chocolate Orange Cake recipe about whether to use butter or not. In the list of ingredients the cocoa is there, and the eggs and the sugar, and even the large orange - but definitely no butter.

In the instructions, however, it says specifically: "cream the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon" - advice which might come as something of a bombshell as it is the first time there is any mention of butter. And as there is no indication as to how much butter, it is rather puzzling.

The Evening Standard asked chef Paul Young - one of the finest chocolatiers around - to see if he could make head or tail of it all. Young, who worked with Marco Pierre White at The Criterion, moved on to Quo Vadis and has now launched an online chocolaterie at www.payoung.net, made two cakes - one with and one without butter.

The result: one (without butter) looking like the delight in the book and one (with 125 grams of butter) resembling an edible but deflated version of the original, richer and more moist than intended. He said: "The original recipe works perfectly. The butter one works too but not quite as well. It sinks in the centre."

With the Chocolate Nemesis the fault might be blamed on the difficult technique or the lack of detailed information in the recipe. With Chocolate Orange Cake, however, it might be unfair to blame Nigella herself: it may be that the fault crept in at publisher Chatto & Windus. However no one at Chatto & Windus was available for comment.

Young thinks this could be the case as Nigella created a near similar cake using clementines in How To Eat. "I think it is the editorial. I don't think it is Nigella's fault because it's similar to the previous cake," he said.

"After reading and reviewing her books she is very consistent. She had made this recipe before. It is quite a big mistake if she has done it but I think it's not her fault."