Hello. This evening I baked two 1/2 sheet cakes. One yellow, one chocolate. They are for a party tomorrow, so I don't need to ice & decorate them until tomorrow, so once they were completely cool, I wrapped them rightly with plastic wrap and put them in my refrigerator. I had also made pasta salad, which contains broccoli and put that in the fridge as well, wrapped in plastic wrap in a bowl. I went to take something out of the fridge a couple hours later and I noticed a horrible broccoli smell. Do you think my cakes will be safe since they are wrapped tightly? Or should I take them out and hope they don't harden at room temp? I would appreciate your opinion.

take them out and leave them wrapped in plastic at room temp, they will be fine, dont want to risk the odors getting into the cake.

This isn't really specific to your cake, but you can put some activated charcoal in a jar with cheesecloth across the top in your fridge. No more odors. Period.

My DH and I saw this on that Food Detectives show. When it dawned on us that "hey we use that kind of charcoal in our fish tank!", I got a very small mason jar (like maybe 1 1/2 inches high), filled it with the charcoal (which we had in an industrial size container), put a piece of cheesecloth in place of the metal lid and put it in our fridge.

We have not smelled ANYTHING funky in our fridge since that day. It has been at least 3 or 4 months - I stil haven't had to change out the charcoal!!!

HTH,

Karen

Do you have to do anything to the charcoal? Wet it? I'd really like to try this the baking soda sometimes just doesn't cut it.

Judi

I would take them out as long as they are wrapped they will be fine. keep in mind they are baked goods so unless you had some sort of extreme heat situation you will be fine. I would always cover them though as they will dry out.
I also have used baking soda to keep in my fridge for odors and put a new box in every month. hope this helps.
Karen

No. That's the really cool thing about it. It has something to do with all of the microscopic surfaces of the charcoal.

I literally poured the charcoal pieces into the jar, cut a piece of cheesecloth to fit, and screwed the metal ring on. It took maybe 10 minutes at most, and that was because I had to find a jar and my cheesecloth!

Baking soda really didn't do much for us either. There have been NO discernible odors since I put that jar in the fridge. Even with leftover Chinese, Thai, etc.


Karen

They sell commercial filters with activated charcoal for your fridge, so it would definitely work. You can pick up some for as cheap as $5. I know The Container Store sells them, and I recently saw them at BBB. If you had it on hand, why not make your own?

Thanks so much for the ideas everyone! I took my cakes out. I will try the charcoal thing very soon.

what.is.activated.charcoal.?