Welcome to the Cake Decorators Q&A

Hey guys i have a question, in the next few weeks i have cake orders here there and everywhere and now a close family member has asked for one on that weekend too… what i wanted to know is if they wanted a cake to eat on the saturday how far in advance could i ganash, cover with fondant and decorate a mudcake before worring about it going stale?? some advice would be great 🙂

Hi Amydurham

Which mud cake recipe were you thinking of using? Paul’s moist chocolate cake recipe has a shelf life of 5 days, but I know from baking it myself that it keeps for much longer. The long shelf life mud cake recipe in the tutorial library has extended shelf life, you can read the details in this blog http://www.cakeflix.com/blog/how-to-make-chocolate-mud-cake. Which ever recipe you decide on, the cake can be made in advance and kept frozen until you need to decorate it. I normally decorate 3 days in advance for mud cake and madeira cake and keep in a cool room in a cake box. The long shelf life cake improves with ageing so you could do that 4 days in advance as I did recently. Hope this helps.

thankyou for the feedback i will try out the long shelf life mud and decorate tuesday night 🙂 the cake is going to be a three tier and my cake boxes arent high enough to cover, what would you suggest as an alternative??

You can get the extra strong boxes for tiered cakes online, but if you don’t have time now to order one I suggest you box them up individually, if that is an option and stack at the venue. If you can’t do that and you’re unable to make a sturdy box, I would place the decorated cake on a large board and carefully and loosely cover it a heavy grade cling film. You’d have to enlist some help to lift the cake into your delivery vehicle and travel with it. The cake would need to travel on a completely flat surface. This site http://www.carinascupcakes.co.uk/product_p/twb14.htm shows the strong boxes, you can see others by googling boxes for tiered cakes. There may still be time to order a strong box, your cake would be a lot safer in one! x