Frozen Gourmet

The second half of the frozen chocolate cake came out for a dinner party in November.  I have a report that it seemed a bit stale, but I thought it was pretty good, and that the contact time spent between the cake and the icing made for mushier boundaries between the two, making the whole thing like a dense icing-cake rather than fluffy cake layers separated by icing.  I can see how that might not be to everyone’s taste.  I think the moral of the story is that this cake freezes OK, but don’t leave it sitting in the freezer for too many months before eating it.

Apparently freezing risotto is a great way to make mashed potatoes.  I am trying to be the guinea pig for my frozen food experiments, but due to circumstances of timing on this occasion, my wife volunteered (or I volunteered her – the result is the same, anyway) to try a serving of frozen leek risotto with goat cheese.  The goat cheese was not frozen, and was added upon reheating.  Apparently it all just turned into mush and the flavour of the leeks disappeared.  Good to know – risotto makes for good leftovers, but not out of the freezer.

McCain does it, so why can’t I?  But my cake doesn’t need to be flavourless despite its claim of chocolatiness, and I don’t need an inch of perfectly peaked fluffy icing on top.  I’m talking about good old chocolate layer cake covered with a normal layer of icing which is heavy on the sugar and butter.

Searching the web for a good recipe for chocolate layer cake for my wife’s birthday, I came across this one which actually claims that it can be frozen.  Oh, but wait, it just says you can freeze the freshly baked naked layers.  Rest assured that if anything is getting frozen here, it’s the completed iced cake.  Not being one for inefficient food production, I figured if I’m making one cake I might as well make two (it was also to hedge against running out in case a lot of people came to the open-invitation party).  And so it was that I had an entire cake left over and space designated for it in the freezer.  I first froze the cake fully exposed on a plate, so that I could then pull it out and wrap it in waxed paper and then aluminum foil without messing with the icing spread patterns on the top and sides.  When I thawed it a month later, aside from some pesky condensation which took hours to disappear in the July humidity, it was as good as new.

But at that second party, we only ate half of the thawed cake.  What to do with the other half but to repeat the process?  I know you can’t refreeze meat (note to self: think about this for a future post), but nobody ever told me I can’t refreeze cake.  That half cake is still in my freezer, just over two months old now, and I’m torn between running a six-month experiment (i.e. resurfacing at Christmas) and just pulling it out and enjoying it in the next few weeks.  I’ll let you know when I decide.

Having left the corporate world in order to feed my family during the school year (among other things), I’m faced with the endless culinary possibilities of today’s internet-based recipes and globally sourced exotic foods, while at the same time wanting to take advantage of local and healthy meat and produce where possible.  I derive a certain enjoyment from food preparation but I often find it disappointing to put in all that effort only to have everything be gone in far less time than it took to prepare.  I’d rather prepare larger batches and have food ready to be thawed for dinner.

I know that industrialization of food production has been done to death, and that’s not quite what I’m looking for.  However, I would like to explore the use of the freezer as a way to put together good healthy food ingredients as well as near-fully prepared meals or dishes, whether in family- or single-sized portions.  I can test these concoctions on myself during lunches, since I will eat pretty much any thawed mush, but I will hopefully discover frozen food secrets on the internet and in my own kitchen through my experimentation, providing a healthy and happy eating experience without necessarily slaving away between 4pm and 6pm every day.