Wrapping and Storing Cakes

Did you know that how you store your cakes can make a big impact on how your cake tastes in the end? I'm Rachael Teufel and I'm excited to head into the kitchen and share with you a couple of ways that I like to wrap and store my cakes to maximize flavor and moisture content, as well as prolong the life of my cakes. Let's head into the kitchen and get started. So now that I have let my cakes cool for about an hour to an hour and a half, they're cool to touch, and I am not going to use these right away. I'm going to actually tuck them away in the refrigerator. But before I do that, I want to make sure that I wrap them appropriately. So I want to do that for a couple of reasons. The first reason being, I just want to make sure that I lock in all of that moisture. So I'm just going to take a piece of plastic wrap and I'm going to lift my cake and my pan the same time. And I'm literally going to, well, let's center this just a little bit better, but I'm literally going to just take the plastic wrap and cinch it down really nice and tight over the top. Nice and tight over the top again. And then I'm gonna pull my sides in and then wrap the underside as well. Now, what this does is allows my cake to maintain the moisture that it has inside of here for a few days. You know, if you're like me and you bake on certain days and fill and ice on other days, you need to make sure that your cakes are wrapped and sealed properly. And then I also label them. So when I label them, I simply just put the date on it. So let's do a fun date. Let's do Halloween just because you know, why not? And then I usually put the flavor as well and I shorten it, my zucchini lime cake. And that way, once I placed this in the refrigerator, then I know what cake it is and what day it was baked so that there's no question about what I am creating here. So that is how you want to wrap them. And as far as storing them, I literally will just start stacking these up in my refrigerator. I'll put one down and then I'll wrap this one in saran wrap and put the other one on top of it. And then I know that this is a pair and this is just going to get set into the refrigerator overnight. And let's talk a little bit about why I put it in the refrigerator overnight. Cake is a sponge and it expands and contracts with temperature, and it's super important that we allow our cakes to rest. So you may have had an experience where you baked a cake and almost as soon as it was cool, you decided to go ahead and stack it and put your icing on it and what you might notice later that day, if your cake wasn't cool, and if it's at room temperature, it probably would have been okay, but if it were hot at all, it actually starts to shrink a little bit and then you see some variation in your buttercream. So that's why, first of all, that's the reason why I like to chill them at least a few hours, if not overnight, almost always for me, it's overnight, but it just allows that cake to kind of come back to a cool state and you'll notice too, like when you first pull it out of the oven, it might have, you know, this big luscious-looking dome, but then as it starts to cool that dome sort of shrinks up a little bit or your sides shrink in from the sides of the pan and that's a good thing. You want that to happen. You want your cake to just kind of rest and relax and come to a sort of a neutral state. You would never want to pull a cake straight out of the freezer, for instance, and start to ice it, exactly for the same reasons, but for the opposite principle, that if you have a frozen cake, frozen items tend to shrink, and when they come back to room temperature, they sort of come to this neutral state. And again, if they're heated, then they expand and get bigger. So that's the principle behind why you just want to kind of let this cake do its thing, come to room temperature. You can take it directly from the refrigerator usually because the refrigerator isn't ice cold, you know, it's cool enough that it's keeping everything preserved, but not so cold that it's frozen and it really needs a lot of time to come back to temperature, so just a small little science lesson for you so you know why we let our cakes rest in between baking and icing. Now that you know my secret to keeping my cake moist, I hope you implement this in your own kitchen in order to create some beautifully tasty cakes. I promise just using a couple of these tips and tricks will help you provide a cake that is moist and delicious every single time.