How to Store Your Decorated Cakes:
Being in the business of cakes, I get asked only too often … How do I store this cake?
Even if I get asked this, I give the advice out upon pickup or delivery, as a fair few people know how to store their cakes for their appropriate icing. And why should they?
Customer are not the experts. The cake decorator is.
I need to share this with my customers to help them get the best result after exchanging hands. So I thought that I would write up a short article with tid bits of information on how to store your decorated cakes.
I’m going to cover buttercream and fondant Cakes, Fresh whipped Cream Cakes, as these are the main types of cakes I deal with.
Storing Buttercream Cakes
Buttercream is a mixture of icing sugar, butter and a touch of vanilla essence. Different colourings and flavourings can be added, but this is essentially the base block of any buttercream recipe.
Buttercream cakes should ultimately be kept in the fridge for no longer than approximately 5 days, uncut, and taken out of the fridge about 30 minutes to half an hour before serving. I like to suggest this, as it softens the buttercream and cake ever so slightly, and is more enjoyable than rock hard icing and cake.
If you don’t have the fridge space, or would prefer to serve your buttercream cake at complete room temperature, your cake can stay out in a cool spot in the house for no longer than 3 days. You may ask why can buttercream be left out of the fridge? This is due to the large amount of sugar stabalising any milk solids.
Storing Fondant Cakes
Fondant… what a wonderful, wonderful cakey invention. With fondant, many figurines and more intricate detail can be added to your cake. And how do you store this you may ask?
Leave it out on the bench… simple… whatever you do, just don’t put an entire fondant covered cake in the fridge. Why? Because you will ruin your cake. The fondant will sweat, and become sticky and tacky, and your colours may even run together creating havoc for your special occasion.
I recommend with fondant covered cakes to leave peacefully in a cool spot in your house. I have a lot of people asking “What about ants?”. Depending on how bad your ant problem is, I usually recommend if possible, to create a water barrier. I.e; stabalise your cake on top of a sturdy and suitable sized stand, surrounded by a shallow container of water. This way, the ants will drown on their trail to your cake.
Storing Mixed Buttercream, Fondant, Ganache & (Other) Cakes
Yes… there are those cakes that come right down the middle (or slightly one more than the other) of buttercream and fondant.
Solution for Storing Mixed Icings:
1. If your cake and/or cupcakes only have minimal fondant decorations, by all means, put these in the fridge if you’d like them to last the 5 days. Your fondant attachments may very well go sticky, and not be the most enjoyable to devour…but your amount of ever so tasty buttercream will definitely make up for this.
2. If your cake and/or cupcakes have a fair few fondant decorations, or you don’t want to risk putting the cake in the fridge… simply leave out in a cool spot in your house for no longer than 3 days.
Storing of fresh whipped Cream Cakes.
This should be always store in fridge. It's a cool Cake . Should be consumed within 2 days to have same flavour of Cake. After that the texture of Cream gets dry, cracked and taste less. Should be covered in Cake box, to have fresh cream tests.
Made an eggless vanilla cake with whipped Cream frosting. Delivered the cake the day before (wasn't told it was for the following day), obviously told the customer to refrigerate the cake because of the whipped Cream frosting. When spoke to the customer they were very dissatisfied with the cake because it was a bit hard. I now that refrigeration dries out a cake and don't know how long they out the cake prior to serving. Help!! What do could have been done differently?
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