You’re ready to bake a beautiful cake, but you don’t have time to do the whole cake from start to finish in one afternoon. Well, this is where I’m ready to make your life so much easier. Bake your cake rounds in advance, and store them in the freezer until you have time to fill, stack, and decorate them. This method keeps me sane, and I’ll walk you through how to do this in today’s tutorial:

 

I get it. Baking and decorating a cake can take a lot of time.  Time is everything in my life, and doing what I can to make life easier, but still being super productive, is always in my best interest. Some weeks I make only one cake, and others I’ll be in the kitchen every day making dozens of cakes for various clients, projects, orders, the cookbook, and just for fun. How do I possibly have time for this? It’s simple! I space out the work.

I’ll spend some time one day planning out my cakes. I’ll draw them out, write out the ingredient list I think I’ll need for each particular cake and design, I’ll order everything for grocery pickup later that day, and I’ll be done for the day in cake land.

The next day, I’ll do all my baking. I’ll bake the rounds for each cake I’ll need for the week. Yes, that means almost 7 days in advance for some cakes, but I usually frost those cakes within the week, so they’re not spending too much time in the freezer. So order the ingredients on day one (or grocery shop), bake the next day, and then decorate the cake the days after that. Everything is split up into separate days, that way you’re not running the full marathon in one day – little 5K bites until it’s complete.

“But Mandy! The freezer will dry out my cakes and ruin the moist texture and will mess up the flavors!” Not necessarily. It all depends on how you’re storing them in the freezer, and how long you leave them in there. I often get the question about how I store my cake rounds before frosting them, so I thought I’d dedicate an entire blog post walking you through how I do it. It may not be for everyone, but it’s been very successful for me, so I’ve been sticking to it.

First, I bake my cake rounds, flip them out of their pans, and let them cool to almost room temperature on a wire rack on the counter. I don’t want to let them sit there forever, because they might dry out if so. I wait until when I touch them, they are still a teeny bit warm, but not cool to the touch. You don’t want condensation on your cake, so err on the side of cooled rounds, versus warm toasty ones.

Secondly, I DOUBLE wrap each cake layer separately and carefully. Twice is best. If you’re going to have them in there for more than maybe 4-5 days or so, I would either triple wrap them, or wrap them again in aluminum foil just to make sure. You want to protect those cake layers while they’re in the freezer. I really like the Costco plastic wrap, or this Walmart one with the slide cutter option – makes things go much faster from my experience.

Thirdly, I place cardboard cake rounds between the layers. It probably goes without saying that you don’t need to do this when you’re storing them without stacking. I do this so the cake layers will remain flat while in the freezer, and won’t change their shape to whatever they’re pressed up against.

That’s it! Super simple, right? When I’m ready to use the cake layers, I’ll pull them out of the freezer and place them on the counter, still wrapped, while I make the buttercream and get my ganache ready. That way they’re not totally frozen, but still pretty cool when I begin to decorate.

 

Let me know if you have any questions, and I’ll make sure to explain things better if needed. Thanks, and happy baking!