Welcome to the Cake Decorators Q&A

I’ve been asked to make the football huddle cake for a friend. However I am away for 5 days immediately leading up to the birthday!

Can I make it in advance? How will it keep? I always use ganache but the cake will either be vanilla or toffee.

Any advice? Can I freeze/fridge and which cake would cope best?

Thanks

Hi therese1

It’s always difficult to advise on shelf life. How well a cake will keep depends very much on storing conditions. Most sponge cakes made with butter or margarine will stay fresh for approx 5 days. Oil based recipes will give two or three days more. If you use the right recipe, ganached cake can be stored in a cake box in the fridge.
Un iced, filled and ganached cakes can definitely be frozen then decorated at a later date. The only problem you may encounter is with the defrosting time. The cake would need to sit out most part of a whole day before icing and decorating. Would that give you sufficient time to finish it off? Alternatively choose an oil based recipe which can be stored in the fridge.

However, I wouldn’t recommend freezing a fully iced and decorated cake.
It can be done as long as the cake is completely sealed in a couple of heavy duty boxes and covered with strong plastic. The idea is to prevent any moisture coming into contact with the icing and decorations. The one and only time I did it, the result wasn’t good but I know some people do, do it quite successfully.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you need any other information. 🙂