For those who work/own in/a bakery, do you bake all the cakes one day and just freeze them for the rest of the week?

I had heard that bakeries bake all different sized cakes of their most popular flavors, freeze them, and when they received an order just popped them out of the freezer, iced and decorated. It sounded somewhat crazy to me (because all the financial risk involved), but have any of you heard about this or do any of you do this?

Thanks for your help!

I bake all of my cakes on Tues and Wednesday for the coming Fri/Sat orders. I flip them onto plastic wrap as soon as they come out of the oven. Then I freeze chocolate cakes and refrigerate most other flavors. I keep a few cakes put up in the freezer for a last minute customer in a bind. Freezing a cake, provided you wrap it well, does not tarnish the quality of the cake. Certainly only freezing for a week or two. I start my decorating on Thursday if I have more than 10 orders.

There are many bakeries that freeze cakes they've baked or buy frozen cakes to pull out and decorate. I can see how a bakery dealing in volume would HAVE to do this. I have to keep my orders to a minimum to be able to provide a non frozen cake. Think about it...if you can only do 10-15 cakes per weekend they must be on the high dollar side to be able to make $$....if you can crank them out faster you can sell them for less because you are dealing in volume. So, to make any $$ you have to either provide speciality cakes for a premium price or volume cakes for a less price.

Thanks SweetConfections. So you make the cakes according to your orders and just a few extras for emergency/last-minute orders? Do you provide a limit for yourself every week to say "I'm booked"?

i know that the grocery store bakery that my mom wrks at does but they have alot of orders.

Yes, sometimes I have to tell people I am booked. If I have a wedding cake...10 cakes are my limit! If I don't have a wedding cake 15 are my limit. I count cookie orders in this also. I have to be able to give each order the attention it deserves.

And yes, I make the cakes according to my order load for that week. The extra's I bake are usually gone by the second week. Most of the time when someone is calling the day before an event they don't care what it is...as long as it's a cake so I bake a vanilla and chocolate as extra's and leave it at that.

I see, it makes a lot more sense now. Thanks SweetConfections, your posts were the answers I was looking for.

Great! Glad to have helped!

Walmart freezes them for a year before they're sold. Just a lil tid-bit I learned on here lol

I myself bake as fresh as possible, but I don't have the volume that most people have. The past few weeks have been really busy for me, but still that only amounts to 2-3 cakes a week. But I do what Sweet Confections does. I immediately wrap the cake in seran wrap when it comes out of the oven and stick it in the freezer. The seran wrap holds any moisture (steam) in that the cake would lose when it starts to cool.

I baked a banana cake on Monday or Tuesday last week, froze it, decorated it on Friday/Saturday and delivered it on Sunday and they were all asking me how i keep my cakes so moist. I told them I had my own little secret lol

one bakery I worked, baked two, sometimes three times a week. full sheets, 8" and 10" rounds mostly. the full sheets were cut to fill whatever sheet cake orders/case necessary. also baked 8 and 10 vanilla and chocolate cream cake layers for dessert cakes(coconut, ger choc).

the recipe for their cake REQUIRED that the cakes be frozen for at least one day but no longer than 3 for perfect results in taste and texture. I didn't believe it until they proved it to me. they would bake the cakes, allow them to remain in their pans on cooling racks overnight at room temp.. removed from tins and turned onto parchment lined trays and placed in freezer for the previous stated amount of time. It really made all the difference in the world. I now do the same thing with my own at home.

Many years ago I decorated cakes using the icings in the supermarket. I came back to cake decorating after I had my niece's wedding cake - I could tell it was frozen because the cake had a sandy texture to it, not crumbly or flaky - sandy like dry!

I am not bashing anyone here who does freeze a cake in advance, but the wedding cake must have been stored for a few weeks to get this dry and nasty. It even tasted like freezer.

I called them the following Monday and let them know that, unless they gave her back some of her money, I would be reporting them to all authorities possible. They offered $100, but I would not settle for anything less than $150 (the cake cost $375 - all buttercream from a bucket!). I ended up settling for $125, which gave them an extra day for a hotel room on their honeymoon.

Theresa

tmriga, sorry to hear about that experience! They probably didn't wrap the cake properly (to seal out air) or left it in the freezer for months! YUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I, personally, have frozen cakes for about 4 weeks and it hasn't made a bit of difference in the taste...any longer would be like keeping beef in the freezer for 2 years! YECKKKK!

The wedding cake was definitely nasty - we would have been better off with Twinkies (and they would have cost less, too!).

I would think that keeping beef in the freezer for two years would give you beef jerky when you take it out, wouldn't you? LOL!

Theresa

ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

LMBO tmriga!

SweetConfectionsChef wrote: ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!
and Nglez09 wrote: LMBO tmriga!

My response --

'Tis the season to be jolly; glad to have made you laugh!

Theresa

I bake on Thursday for Friday and Saturday orders. I start early and if it takes me all day and into the night then sobeit. I do not like freezing much more then a day. I do the glaze thing when they are warm and then wrap, that is the cakes. I will do cookies a couple of days ahead and freeze. I start decorating early on Friday and do the orders according to the pick-up times. If I have orders going out on Friday, I bake on Wednesday, freeze, and then decorate Thursday pm for Friday am pickup.All my wedding cakes tiers are base iced, so if I have 2 or 3 weddings, all the cakes are base iced, and ready for the final coat and decorating.On Monday I wrap all the boards and put all the items I need for each wedding or order in a row on a top counter . I then have everything I need for each order ahead. I do not like hunting for stuff. This way if I happen to have missed something that I needed to order I still have time to place an order and get it here before the time the cake has to go out. While my cakes are baking, I start making my icing in large batches and put in 5 gal buckets and refrigerate, that way all my icing is done. If I have to color the icing, I use a seperate small bucket and mark it for which order it is for. If I have alot of orders, I pre-ice them ahead like an assembly line, and then start to decorate, I find it easier to ice them all first and then do my thing. I guess everyone has there own way of doings things.