Just the other day I was baking a few cakes and ran out of vegetable oil.  I had tons of canola oil so I found myself searching for the answer to the question, can you substitute vegetable oil with canola oil?  Thankfully the answer is YES!

Of course you want to use the exact ingredients of a recipe when you can but if you need a quick substitution for vegetable oil then canola oil is a safe bet.  My cakes baked and tasted exactly the same.  The reason this works is that canola oil is a type of vegetable oil.  The difference is that vegetable oil is made up of many different oils while canola oil just uses the one.

So, if you find yourself running short on vegetable oil don't worry.  Canola oil will work!

The answer is a big Yes!  This was actually a question I received from a reader a few months ago.  Whenever I have limited time or a few orders in a week, I will bake my cakes earlier in the week and freeze them.   Frozen cakes are also much easier to carve.  If you do it correctly, the cake will remain moist.

When freezing a cake, make sure you follow these steps...

• If necessary, level the cakes first.  It will save you time in the long run.  Frozen cakes are also extremely difficult to level off.
• You can stack leveled cakes like I have here.  Notice the wax paper in between each layer.  I also could have filled the cakes before freezing them to save even more time.  
• Wrap your cakes in plastic wrap as tight as you can without changing the shape of your cake. If you are afraid your cakes will absorb the odors of your freezer, place the plastic covered cakes in a brown bag.
• Keep your cakes on a cake board or flat surface.  If you freeze them on something bumpy, your cake will be bumpy when you defrost it.
• NEVER place anything on top of your cakes before they are frozen.  They will never quite go back to their original shape.
• Defrost your cake before covering it with icing...especially fondant.

Making icing and fondant is an extremely messy job.  It is impossible to have a spotless kitchen after a job like that but there are a few tricks I have come up with to minimize the mess when making fondant.

• Work in a large bowl so you can keep the sugar off the counter.  As you can see in the picture above, I kept the fondant in the bowl until the very end.  I only kneed my dough on the counter when I do not want to add anymore sugar.
• Before you even touch the fondant, rub vegetable shortening on your hands.  By making them greasy, the fondant will not stick to you...AT ALL!  If it does then you need more shortening.
• If you have an electric mixer, you can use your dough hook to make the fondant.  Just be careful to mix extremely slowly in the beginning otherwise, you will have a bigger mess then you can imagine.
• If you decide to use the mixer then grease the bowl first.  Cleanup will go much faster.

There are many products out there that claim to help you bake your cakes level. I like using a combination of 3 methods. I always bake my cakes on a baking stone. The stone helps the cake bake evenly so that it comes out more level and very moist. I also rotate the cake 180 degrees halfway through the baking process. This also helps the cake bake evenly because I do not have a convection oven. Finally I put at least 1 flower nail in each cake. The nail heats up and helps bake the middle of the cake the same as the edges. By putting these three methods together, much less cake is wasted.