I worked on a cake for a little while and had to leave for a bit, so I put it in the fridge, with about half the fondant accents on it (over crusting buttercream). When I took it out of the fridge to finish up, the previously applied fondant pieces are sticky/slimy... will that go away? Does it need to dry out? Pickup is in 4 hours and I need to luster everything, but can't with this problem.

ANy advice? I don't usually refrigerate my cakes - they are decorated the same day as the event usually.

Please help... going into panic mode now!

Whether it will dry out or not has to do with how much humidity there is in the air. If you live where it's very humid, probably not. If you live where it's fairly dry, you might have better luck. And you could also try putting a fan on it to speed up the process. But don't do anything with the cake - not even touch it - until it's dry again. Unfortunately, I'm not sure whether the luster dust will look the same on the part that already had it when the cake went into the fridge as on the part you're just going to do.

I'm in Texas too and this last weekend was horrible with the humidity. That is one reason I do not put any cakes in the fridge. In this environment anything you pull out of the fridge will have condensation on it in just a few seconds.

I was painting on gumpaste with airbrush colors this weekend. Normally don't have a big problem with it, but I was running out of time and needed this to dry fast and they were taking their sweet time. I was using a fan then was using a blow drier on a cool setting.

Unless there is something in your cake that just has to be kept cold, I'd skip the fridge in the future.

Well, hi, my fellow Texans! I'm originally from Houston, and now that I live in Cancún (about a half a mile from the shore), it's hot and humid ALL the time, not just sometimes (and my kitchen has no AC), so I know exactly what heat and humidity can do to a cake. I spend some time out of each year in Mexico City for family reasons, and the difference is astounding - it's cool and the humidity is never over 30%. Of course, every cake I make there is successful and I never have to worry about anything -nothing like here!

I'd say you get use to the humidity, but you really don't. You do learn to work around it though, don't ya?

Ain't that the truth!

I'm in Seattle, where we definitely have our fair share of humidity, but what we don't have (generally) is the heat, which helps.

What I learned from Mike McCarey is that refrigerating fondant and modeling chocolate is fine, but you have to have them bagged tightly before you refrigerate in order to keep the condensation off. (He buys giant plastic bags to put his cakes in and tightly twist-ties them.) What I do with smaller cakes is double wrap them in plastic wrap (catering style). You need to let them come to room temp before you remove the plastic.

Obviously this doesn't work with meringue style butter cream/fondant combination, but should work for what you're describing, since the butter cream was crusted over.

Maybe give it a try with a small test cake to see how it works for you?

Good luck!