Cakes are best when fresh.
Photo: October22 (Shutterstock)
Everyone loves fresh baked goods. No one would ever choose to eat day-old cake, over a fresh cake! Well, I hate to break it to you, but if you’ve eaten cake from a bakery, you’ve eaten “old” cake. But thats actually a good thing.
Some bakery items really are the most delicious the day they’re made, like croissants or doughnuts, but most bakeries are preparing components days, weeks or months ahead of time. This all depends on what the item is and how it can be safely stored. Cake layers and frosting are exceptionally stable and freeze really well—so well, in fact, that you will get a better final product with cold, stored cake elements than if you try to build a cake when it’s fresh. When cake is fresh, the fats haven’t had the opportunity to solidify and completely set, and the structure of the cake is in delicate condition. Trimming, flipping, and icing cake layers in this state will lead to possible tears, loose crumbs, or even complete breakage.
Small bakeries with lower production rates will, at the very least, refrigerate cakes to set the fats so the layers will be easier to work with. Larger bakeries will wrap their layers and freeze them for up to months. Like for bread (it’s basically sweetened bread anyway), the freezer is like the fountain of youth, cake layers thaw and pick up right where they left off. The added benefit is that the fats solidify, the structure sets, and the flavors have developed completely. If you’re freezing cake layers at home—and I highly recommend you do—store them wrapped tightly and upside down. Storing them upside down will flatten any doming your layer might have so there is less waste when trimming. (Or you could always try out the reverse-creaming method we already talked about.)
