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Sugar bloom on sponge cakes - help needed!

317 Views 7 Replies 3 Participants Last post by  trulytreats, 
T
Hello everyone,
We've been running our wholesale bakery for 12 years and make a range of cakes and traybakes for foodservice. All our products are made in batches and frozen before being shipped across the UK with a frozen distributor.
Recently, we've had a few complaints from our customers about sugar bloom on their sponge cakes (see image attached). The cakes are chilled down before being cut with a cutting machine. They're then boxed and frozen before being dispatched.
We can't get to the bottom of why this is happening. It doesn't happen with all cakes, just some and at random. Not sure if it's a build up of moisture casued by the process of chilling and then cutting.
Has anyone experienced this issue or can offer any ideas of how we can stop this from happening?
Thanks :)

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jcakes
a little more information might help narrow down the cause.....
What's the batch size you are making and does it happen more often when you bake, say 12 cakes or only when you bake 5 or 6?
which recipes are having the most incidents of "sugar bloom"? Is it consistently happening in just those recipes or randomly on all of your recipes? When it happens does it happen on everything that was baked that day?
Did anything change (ingredients, inclusions, replacement parts on the cutting machine?) that co-incides with the appearance of the sugar bloom?
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R
improper freezing.
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T
jcakes said:
a little more information might help narrow down the cause.....
What's the batch size you are making and does it happen more often when you bake, say 12 cakes or only when you bake 5 or 6?
which recipes are having the most incidents of "sugar bloom"? Is it consistently happening in just those recipes or randomly on all of your recipes? When it happens does it happen on everything that was baked that day?
Did anything change (ingredients, inclusions, replacement parts on the cutting machine?) that co-incides with the appearance of the sugar bloom?
Click to expand...
We always make these cakes in batches of 16, never less than that. It doesn't happen with everything that was baked that day, just certain batches of cakes, but it's always the pre-cut cakes, which makes us believe it's something to do with the process of cutting them that's causing the issue. Nothing has changed in our process, equipment or ingredients and we've not experienced these problems in the past. We've been making these cakes for many years. The only thing that's different is our ingredients used to be stored on our mezzanine in the unit, but now they're stored in a container outside. Do you think this could be affecting the ingredients?
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T
retiredbaker said:
improper freezing.
Click to expand...
Could you give a little more information on this? We've frozen our products this way for many years and have not experienced this problem. Nothing has changed with the way we freeze our cakes, so I'm not sure why we're having this issue now.
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R
you're doing something slightly different.
did you change sugar from cane to beet or type of flour ?
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jcakes
Are all the cakes you make pre-cut? Do some of the pre-cut ones stay whole/un-cut? I'd experiment with that - make the 16 cakes, then only cut/freeze half and leave the others whole and freeze. See if any develop this bloom.

We use baker's special sugar and when the distributor used to put the sugar on the refrigerated truck overnight (the driver meets the refer and transfers the contents to the truck) our sugar would be as hard as a rock and we'd have to push it through a strainer or "grate it"; it annoyed me to no end, especially since others were having the same issues but the distributor didn't believe us. We didn't notice any degradation in quality, but the sugar was stored in a temp-controlled container overnight; not an outdoor storage for an extended length of time.
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T
jcakes said:
Are all the cakes you make pre-cut? Do some of the pre-cut ones stay whole/un-cut? I'd experiment with that - make the 16 cakes, then only cut/freeze half and leave the others whole and freeze. See if any develop this bloom.

We use baker's special sugar and when the distributor used to put the sugar on the refrigerated truck overnight (the driver meets the refer and transfers the contents to the truck) our sugar would be as hard as a rock and we'd have to push it through a strainer or "grate it"; it annoyed me to no end, especially since others were having the same issues but the distributor didn't believe us. We didn't notice any degradation in quality, but the sugar was stored in a temp-controlled container overnight; not an outdoor storage for an extended length of time.
Click to expand...
No, not all our cakes are pre-cut. We offer uncut and pre-cut versions of some of our cakes. We'll test in the way you suggested and see if we can spot any differences between cut and uncut. The annoying thing is it doesn't happen to all batches. Just some. Thank you for your response though, it's much appreciated
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