2013 Game Changer: Cake on Demand

Soaking Bake E-Z strips. Cutting out parchment circles. Running my oven for hours on end. Washing cake pans. These are a few things I look forward to not doing so much of in 2013.

It's all thanks to a random stop at a Safeway store on the wrong side of the Golden Gate Bridge this morning. On a whim, I popped by the bakery to ask if they'd sell me some uniced cakes. This was not the first time I've tried that move at various grocery stores and bakeries in my neighborhood. Except all the other times the bakery clerks looked at me like I had two heads.

Today, however, I was lucky enough to happen upon the bakery manager, who understood exactly what I was looking for and easily produced two 8-inch chocolate rounds from the freezer.

Courtesy of my new BFF, Phillip, the bakery manager at Safeway in Mill Valley

$10.99 plus tax bought me the two individually-wrapped cakes, with a cake circle and a box as well. Phillip even had 6-inchers to offer.

Decorators: what are your thoughts on buying pre-baked, uniced, frozen cakes? Is it "cheating" if you make no claims to have baked the cakes yourself?
As a buyer, would you be opposed to having factory-baked cakes if the fillings and frosting are made from scratch and the cake is custom-decorated to your specifications?

Mais non! Apparently the French do it as well!

Imagine my delight when I spied these uniced, wrapped genoise cakes available for sale at the G'Detou patisserie supply shop in Paris during my visit last summer. (And then imagine my despair when I realized I knew of nowhere else from which to purchase these cakes, except the G'Detou patisserie supply shop in Paris.)

G'Detou is, naturally, #1 on my abandoned Paris Top 10 list.

Click here to see what some are saying about decorating pre-baked cakes on cakecentral.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts below.