The Truth Behind Good Cakes

Imagine... You have just made a DELICIOUS cake from scratch and it looks absolutely gorgeous. You ice the cake with some delectable buttercream and notice a few crumbs here and there, so you continue applying buttercream. Finally, you decide that the buttercream just isn't cutting it out today, so you pull out the fondant. You cover the cake completely with experience and finesse. As you go about your business, decorating your gorgeous cake, it begins to fall apart, crumbling to pieces.

Courtesy of Food To Heart

This is a scenario that most, if not all, bakers (including me) have encountered at some point or another. Crumbling cakes is a growing epidemic in kitchens everywhere. But wait, there is a solution.

FREEZE!

If you want a good, sturdy cake that doesn't crumble as soon as you touch it, here's the trick.

First, bake the cake (DUH). This technique works with all cakes, homemade and box cakes. After you take the cake out of the oven, let it cool down completely. Leave it in the pan for a good 15 to 20 minutes. Then take it out of the pan by flipping it over on a cake rack. If you have a cake rack, great. If not, just find someplace to leave the cake cooling (not in the pan it baked in).

Then you're going to introduce that cake to your best friend, cling wrap. 

If there's one thing any baker needs a lot of, it's cling wrap. You need it for cakes, fondant, gumpaste, buttercream, chocolate, etc, etc. Rule of thumb: When in doubt about what to do with it, cling wrap it. You take that COMPLETELY cooled down cake and you cling wrap it to death (If it isn't completely cooled down the heat from the cake will condensate inside the cling wrap and you're gonna end up with soggy cake. Soggy cake is not yummy*).Usually two wrap arounds is good enough (one wrap around each way, so the whole cake is covered), but if you feel like it's not wrapped completely enough, a lot of bakers wrap it four times (two wraps in each direction). Once again, this prevents unwanted sogginess.

But this sogginess doesn't come from heat. Quite the opposite actually. It comes from the cold. Why? Well, because you're going to put that cake inside the freezer.

Now hold up a minute! I do realize that the idea of freezing a cake is a turn-off to many of you (it was at first to me), but the truth is that the cakes taste exactly the same (if not better) and they're so much easier to handle and work with. They don't crumble while you're carving, nor do they create those ugly cake "beer bellies" after putting on fondant, or any of those terrible things that happen to our cakes because they're too crumbly

. 

Freezing is just another rite of passage in a cake's life. It's such an important phase in its life that if it doesn't go through it... Well, it just tends to fall apart later in life. So please, save a cake and freeze it. Frozen cakes really are better, I promise, Girl Scouts Honor**

But you know what? If you're still off on those pre-frozen cakes, let me tell you about an awesome Italian remedy!

Italians make great food. Can we agree on that? Pasta, pizza, tiramisu, you name it, if it's Italian, it's GOOD. Well, Italians make cakes too! And their big secret? A very simple sugar and water syrup. This keeps your cake deliciously moist*** and fresh. You boil two cups of water to one cup of sugar and you just sprinkle it on your cake when you're ready to decorate**** (after the cake has fully thawed). The leftover syrup can be refrigerated and it has a shelf life of about a month in the fridge.

This way, the cake is moist and very un-crumbling. Delicious and efficient. Come on now folks, it's time to multi-task (;

*Unless the sogginess is done on purpose with a yummy chocolate sauce or caramel sauce or some other yummy sogginess creator. Water (humidity) sogginess is not yummy. 

**Yes, I am a Girl Scout. I have been for the past 11 years (:

***Moist is NOT soggy. Soggy is yucky, moist is yummy.

****Please do not use the entire recipe. When I say sprinkle, I mean SPRINKLE. Not water it like you would do to a plant. Especially since so many plants die from over-watering...