why can a cake with whipped cream only sit out a couple hours before being tossed, but cheese can age for weeks?
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Microbes require water, sugar, and other things to survive.
Whipped Cream has plenty of water, sugar, and all of the other things life needs (babies literally survive on milk for the first year or so of life). It allows microbes to grow very fast – spoiling the food and making it unsafe to eat.
Cheese has a low water content – not ideal for microbial growth. It typically has a high salt concentration – also not ideal for microbial growth. It’s proteins have been crosslinked into a solid – bacteria typically cannot bore themselves into this structure.
In short, we make cheese to take the highly microbe-growth-supporting (perishable) state of milk/cream and put it into a form that isn’t microbe-growth-supporting (hence, non-perishable) while preserving most of the calories/nutrients for future consumption.
It’s the entire reason for food preservation – make it harder for microbes to grow while preserving nutrition.
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