I am doing a wedding cake this weekend for my mother. She had decided on a stacked 3 tier cake and now she wants the tiers seperated by pillars. She picked out the Grecian Pillars from Wilton but she doesn't like the look of the plate on top of the cake. There were no pillars available that go all the way thru the cake, so I got the plastic "straw" like tubes and am going to cut them to fit in the cake with about half an inch sticking out. The half inch fits just inside the pillars and the pillars would look like they are sitting directly on top of the cake. The next cake would sit on a plate that snaps into the pillars and the hidden straw trick would be done again for the last cake....

Will this be supportive enough? I will be assembling onsite so no travel needs to be done like this. I just need to know if it will stand like this without falling over. It seems to work in my head and on my counter. lol

I think I get what you mean and it sounds a bit shaky to me. So, the plastic tubes which are sunken into the cake will go up inside the grecian pillars? This creates a stilt like support system which I would find a bit worrisome once the cakes are loaded on and adding weight. Anyone else have an opinion?

If I'm imagining this correctly, I think that you're definitely asking for trouble. It's one thing to put the plates on with no cake on them, but once you have cakes on top of that setup they're going to be really unstable.

One thing that you could do would be to attach the tubes to the pillars with some kind of an epoxy cement that would essentially make the pillars into push-through pillars. (Put fondant or gumpaste around the joint so that it doesn't touch the cake itself once they're pushed into the cake.) At least by doing that you'd have a solid pillar that wouldn't have a joint that could bend in the middle of the structure.

Thank you both for your replies. I think I am going to go the easy route and just get the plates to sit on top of each cake. I'll put a few extra gumpaste roses and ivy vines on the plates and she won't even notice...and I'll save myself from having to post in the Cake Distaster section.