I am new to cakes, but have made a few, and had some questions...

1. If you bake the cake before (which I plan on doing) does it help to ice it that night or does it help to freeze it, then ice it the next day?
2. For a buttercream icing cake, do you generally ice it 2x because of crumbs? Or how do you solve the crumb issue?
3. How soon before you serve the cake can you make the fondant accents? How do you store them?

Thanks, and if you have already answered these somewhere, just let me know where to look!

Thanks so much!

I bake my cakes one night, wrap when cool and leave out. Torte/fill/crumb coat the next night. Then ice and decorate a third night.

If you find you are getting a lot of crumbs, you can do a crumb coat, which is just a fine layer of icing. A couple of other things that will help, is to make sure you keep icing between your spatula and your cake, move your spatula in one direction, not back and forth. I also love my cake icer tip.

If I need a fondant piece to be bendable, like if I need to put it around a corner I will do them fresh. If it is something that you don't have to bend you can do them days/weeks ahead of time. I just store mine in a card board box.

You can decorate with them the day before you need the cake, just don't close it up in an air tight container.

you can ice it the night before or the day of...whichever works for you..

some people do ice it twice, especially if you are getting started and are new...the first will be the crumb coat, the second will be the regular icing of the cake...if you freeze it , you wont have as many crumbs and the cake is easier to handle it..but if you do a crumb coat keep the icing that you crumb coat with separate from the icing you use as your final icing...because it has crumbs in it.

i dont use fondant, but worked in two bakeries that did, they usually made the accents the day before and stored them at room temp on a cookie sheet lined with wax paper, dusted with flour on the bottom of the accent