Angel food cake can be a pain to make, but the texture and flavor of a perfectly baked angel food cake can be heavenly. Of course, you should devour angel food cake while it’s still fresh, but is it okay to eat it after a couple of days?
Depending on where you store the angel food cake, it can last for anywhere from 3 days to a week. However, you can extend the life to up to 6 months by storing it in the freezer.
There are a number of ways you can store angel food cake in your kitchen and keep it fresh. I’ll talk about these methods and more in the following sections.
How Long Does Angel Food Cake Last?
First and foremost, you should know what ingredients go into an angel food cake. The base of any angel food cake recipe is egg whites, flour, and sugar.
As an airy cake, you do not have to worry about adding butter or milk to the batter. However, that doesn’t mean it has a very long lifespan, especially after frosting the cake.
Angel food cake has an average lifespan of 2 to 3 days while sitting on a kitchen counter. Any longer and the cake will begin to harden, and any frosting you topped it off with might begin to curdle or separate.
Now, what if you want to bake the angel food cake today and decorate and serve it tomorrow? Can you leave it in the pan overnight?
Yes, you can. As a delicate cake that is prone to collapsing, removing the baked cake from the pan can be a challenge. However, if you want it to harden slightly before removing it from the pan, you can leave it overnight inverted on a wire cooling rack. This will not affect the airiness of the cake very much when you’re finally ready to serve.
However, you should still remember that the cake doesn’t have a very long lifespan at room temperature. The longer you leave it out, the more its texture will change and the less appetizing it will look.
How to Make Angel Food Cake Last Longer?
There are three tried and true methods to keep your angel food cake from spoiling. Let’s go over each method down below.
Keep the Cake in an Airtight Container
When it comes to food spoilage, there are 3 variables you should be wary of – heat, air, and moisture. Basically, if you keep your cake unopened in a warm, humid part of your home, the cake will spoil more quickly.
That said, if you prevent any or all of these variables from penetrating the surface of your angel food cake, you can keep it fresher for longer. To do this, carefully transfer the cake to an airtight container. Finding one the size of an angel food cake pan can be a challenge, but if you have one, you should wash, rinse, and dry it thoroughly before inserting the cake.
This is not mutually exclusive from the other methods I’ll cover below. In fact, you should consider doing this before implementing the following methods.
Refrigerate the Cake
Refrigerators will block heat from accelerating the growth of bacteria in your angel food cake, so consider popping it into your refrigerator. Make sure the cake is fully sealed—ideally in an airtight container—before placing it on a rack far away from the fridge’s cooling fan. That way, the cake will not be exposed to excessive chilled air and become hardened.
Freeze the Cake
The best way to prolong the lifespan of your angel food cake is to freeze it. Doing so can extend the cake’s “freshness” by up to 6 months. Since angel food cake contains no egg yolks or dairy, you do not have to worry about unappetizing crystals forming inside the cake. Still, you should remember to properly defrost your cake before decorating and serving.
Please take note that regardless of which method or methods you use, you should allow the angel food cake to rest for 30 minutes after baking. This will allow the cake to release any pent-up steam, which, if left inside the cake, could become a breeding ground for bacteria.
How to Thaw a Frozen Angel Food Cake
If you want to eat your angel food cake up to half a year after baking it, then you should pop it in an airtight container and leave it in the freezer. However, how do you prepare and dine on a frozen cake?
What you should do is remove the container from the freezer and let it sit on your kitchen countertop for a few hours. Let the cake come to room temperature before opening the lid and serving it.
It will take whole angel food cake longer to defrost than individual slices, so you should just let time do its thing. While doing so, you should think about what sort of frosting and garnishing you want to add to your cake.
How to Tell When Angel Food Cake Is Spoiled?
Angel food cake, like any kind of food, is perishable. Despite your best efforts, the cake might not come out as fresh and as deliciously soft as you wanted, and it might be time to toss it in the trash bin, as much as it pains your soul.
There are a few things to look for to determine whether or not an angel food cake is still fresh or, at the very least, edible.
Crumbly Texture—Unlike other kinds of cake, angel food cake is supposed to be tough and chewy. However, if it has a crumbly texture, that means the cake has absorbed too much moisture.
Foul Smell—After cracking the lid open of a frozen or refrigerated angel food cake, it should smell like nothing. If it has any smells, especially a foul one, then the cake is past its prime, and you need to toss it away.
Moldy Spots—If you’ve noticed green, blue, back, or white fuzz growing on any part of the cake, don’t feel tempted to cut that part off and eat the rest. There’s a good chance that there’s mold growing all over the cake, but it hasn’t had enough time to develop its spores.
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