What Walmart Shoppers Should Know About Its Bakery Cakes

When you walk into Walmart's bakery department, you might think what happens there is baking. According to an ex-employee on TikTok, that may not be so. The ex-employee said the cakes arrive frozen from a centralized location. So instead of ordering ahead of time to give the bakers time to bake, you have to order ahead of time to give the cake time to thaw. However, the decoration is still done in the store.

This is fairly normal operating procedure. Comments on the original video mentioned other grocery store bakeries do the same thing. Frozen cakes keep well for up to three months, and this method works because it locks in moisture. In fact, you can even freeze a whole cake, frosting and all, if you know how to do it right. So the next time you order a cake from Walmart's bakery, remember the workers will need time to thaw it out before custom decorating.

While freezing cake at home can lead to some textural degradation if you store it in a standard, static freezer found in most homes, industrial freezers tend to freeze faster. The building of ice crystals can dry out the cake, but the more immediate the freeze, the less time water has to gather and create large crystals. Fast freezing results in fresher food. So the cakes from Walmart's central bakeries should have a similarly light and airy breadcrumb as if they were baked in store. And in a grocery store bakery chocolate cake ranking, we named the Walmart cake a decent budget option (although it's not our top favorite).

Not every cake type holds up well during freezing. Delicate cakes like angel food are best served fresh. If you are freezing a whole cake, icing and all, cream cheese or buttercream frosting freeze really well. Other frostings may lose their nice texture. If you already have a cake at home you want to freeze for later, make sure you follow our sheet pan trick for expertly freezing individual cake slices!