Does anyone know if you can freeze a decorated cake? If so, how? How would you defrost it? Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks.

i wouldn't advise it...there are too many chances for things to wrong once the cake begins to thaw. the biggest problem would be condensation forming and causing your colors to bleed. i would suggest freezing the cake w/ a crumb coat at the most if you are worried about do things in advance.

If you have to freeze it as a last resort, package it well to protect against freezer odors. Defrost it in the fridge if you can. If not, defrost it in a cool room to reduce the impast of condensation.

If you have bright colors, or heavy decorations, there can be problems.

I just had this problem a few weeks ago. My cakes were in boxes so I wrapped the boxes with 2 layers of Press-N-Seal Wrap and then 2 layers of Saran Wrap. They stayed frozen for almost a week. Then when I took them out to defrost them I unwrapped the boxes and took the cake on the cake board right out of the box and set it in a dark room to defrost. The cakes were still moist and I had no problems with condensation or colors bleeding into one another. Good luck. Hope this helps.

I've frozen a fully decorated buttercream covered cake with royal icing poinsettias on it. My Wilton III instructor told me how to do it and it worked flawlessly--the cake was put in the car while frozen and driven 12hrs. to NH. It was cool in the car--it was winter--but not freezing, either. I have to admit, I was amazed to open up the box and find not one thing damaged or out of place!

The way I did it was:
1. Cleaned out the freezer, making sure that there were no funny smells--I put in a nice fresh box of baking soda just in case.
2. I placed the buttercream iced cake in the freezer for 24hrs. with NO covering over it--this sets all of the decoration so that it can be wrapped while still frozen.
3. I took it out of the freezer and wrapped it carefully with 2 layers of saran wrap, being careful to keep the saran as unwrinkled as possible. The flowers on my cake kept the saran from actually touching the smoothed buttercream. If keeping it smooth is an issue, you may need to puts toothpicks in hidden areas to keep the saran from touching.
4. I then wrapped it in a layer of heavy duty aluminum foil and put the whole thing in a box.
5. I put the whole thing back in the freezer--about 1 week--before we went away.

The cake was basically defrosted when we got to NH, so for me, it was a defrost at room temp for about 12hrs.--still covered airtight. I carefully removed all of the covering and I had no bleeding or condensation issues.

Obviously. freezing a fully decorated cake isn't the ideal, but it can be done successfully and with minimal problems.

Rae