Everything we bake is delivered, so the box arrives at your door rather than leaving a shop in your hands. That changes one thing: what happens in the first ten minutes after delivery is up to you, and it decides how the pastry eats that evening.
The short version. Anything with cream or fresh fruit goes in the refrigerator right away. Madeleines stay out. Nothing goes in the freezer. And most of what we make was made for the day it arrived, so the plan should be to eat it, not to keep it.
The longer version, piece by piece.
Madeleines: on the counter, today
Madeleines are a small sponge cake and they are at their peak for a few hours after baking. Ours are baked the morning they go out for exactly that reason, and the honest window is 24 hours.
Leave them in their box, closed, at room temperature. Do not refrigerate them. Cold air dries a sponge crumb faster than the kitchen counter does, and a chilled madeleine turns dense and dull. If a few survive to the next morning, a couple of minutes in a low oven brings the crisp edge back briefly. A microwave does the opposite and makes them rubbery.
If you want to know why the clock runs so fast on them, I wrote about what makes a madeleine a madeleine, and the short life is part of the definition.
Tartelettes: refrigerated, two days
A raspberry tart, a pine-nut tart, an apple rose tart. These hold for two days in the refrigerator, and the first day is better than the second.
Keep them in the box they came in rather than wrapping them. Plastic film pressed against fresh fruit bruises it and traps moisture on the glaze. Keep the box away from anything strong-smelling in the fridge, because pastry cream picks up onion and cheese with enthusiasm.
Take them out twenty to thirty minutes before serving. A tart straight from the fridge has a hard shell and a cream that tastes of less than it should. At cool room temperature the shell gives properly and the fruit tastes like fruit.
Whole cakes: cold until an hour before, then eat it
A Fraisier or a Forêt-Noire is made for the day it is served, and that is the day to serve it.
Refrigerate it as soon as it arrives. Take it out somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour before cutting, depending on how warm the room is. The mousseline in a fraisier is butter-based and needs that time to soften from firm to silky. The cream in a Forêt-Noire needs less, so keep it cold longer.
Cut with a long, thin knife dipped in hot water and wiped dry between slices. That is the entire secret to clean slices of a layered cake, and it works on a cold-set entremet too, where a warm blade goes through the glaze without dragging it.
Leftover cake goes back in the fridge, covered loosely, and is good the next day and acceptable the day after. Whipped cream and fresh strawberries do not improve with time, so do not expect them to.
Quiche: refrigerate, reheat in the oven
The mini quiches keep for two days refrigerated. To serve them warm, put them on a tray in a moderate oven for around ten minutes, until the center is hot. Do not microwave them. The pastry goes soft and the filling weeps, and there is no getting either back.
They are also fine at room temperature, which is how they are usually eaten at a morning meeting.
Chocolate and glaze: steady temperature
Anything with a chocolate finish or a mirror glaze dislikes temperature swings more than it dislikes cold. Moving a cake from fridge to warm kitchen to fridge again puts condensation on the surface, and on chocolate that eventually shows as a pale bloom. It is harmless. It is also ugly. Decide where the cake is going to sit and leave it there until it is time to serve.
The freezer
We do not freeze anything before it reaches you, and I would rather you did not freeze it afterward. Cream, fresh fruit, and a crisp pastry shell all come back from the freezer worse than they went in. A madeleine comes back from it as something else entirely.
If the quantity is the worry, the fix is upstream: order closer to the number you will actually serve rather than ordering extra and hoping the freezer will hold the difference.
The first ten minutes, in Texas
The delivery window is confirmed by email, and someone needs to be there to take the box. In a Houston summer the drive from the door to the refrigerator should be short. A cream cake sitting on a warm kitchen island for half an hour has already begun to slump, and a glazed tart on a sunny porch is in worse shape than that. I wrote about what heat and humidity do to pastry for outdoor events, and the same physics applies to a countertop in August.
Open the box, look at it, and put it away. Take the photograph later, when it comes back out.
When to eat what
If you ordered several things for one day, eat them in this order: madeleines with the coffee first, tartelettes and quiche at the meal, the whole cake at the end, and anything left goes back into the cold before the guests leave.
If you have a question about a specific piece, ask when you order. Get in touch and we will tell you plainly how long it holds and how to serve it.