Ok I'm making my first "big" cake for a birthday party next weekend. It's going to be 3 square tiers. My question is this........when you stack your cakes, do you use bases or just stack each cake on top of each other with dowels? TIA.

u need boards under each tier to support it on the dowels. the dowels hold the weight of the cake above, not the actual cake!

Each tier needs to be on a cake board or separator plate. Use wooden or plastic dowels. If you're going to transport it somewhere already stacked, you may want to drive a sharpened dowel down through the cake (if you use plastic plates, obviously that wouldn't work) to keep the tiers from slipping off of each other.

As you may find out, there are many different ways that people do this.
My method is to have each stacked tier on a board (cake board, foamcore). Dowels (I use drinking straws) cut to the SAME length for support in each tier and then a sharpened dowel down through all 3 tires for stability.

Hope that helps!

Thanks y'all for your help. Everybody's so helpful.

Or we could get you started off right and suggest that you use SPS for support.