Help! My customer wants a fake cake for the bottom tier of her wedding cake. The cake will be in buttercream icing. Where do I start? Can I put BC directly on the styrofoam cake? Can I do the fake cake ahead of time and not have fading or discoloration? What are the potential problems? This will be my first wedding cake for a customer and I want it to look great!

I was told to use a thin coating of Crisco on the dummy (smooth on with your hands) and I did this for a cake show and it worked great.

I have a cake to do this weekend with two of the tiers in styrofoam and I'm just going to do it all as if it was real cake (not doing some ahead)...only because I'm afraid that if I do it two seperate times they may look slightly different...you know, you kinda get a momentum going. But yeah, you can do the styrofoam one ahead if you want.

OK, thx. If that is all it takes (coating the styrofoam with Crisco), I will try it.

I'm working on a dummy cake at the moment and wondered about the sharp edge with the styrofoam. Do you need to angle the edges of the styrofoam to make it a little rounder before laying the fondant on top?

Yes, round out the edges by pushing against a hard surface as you rotate the dummy. Will soften the edges nicely!

Ingenious. How simple, thank you. Do you apply crisco or BC to coat the discs? Have you used RKT to make the layers. The surface is pretty pockmarked with the RKT. What is the best way to fill the little crevices if I go that route. I'm worried that I might not be able to find the large rounds I will need for the bottom layers.

What is RKT? (Sorry, but I'm new at CC lingo).

Sorry, RKT is Rice Krispie Treats.

Go to Dallas Foam Company on the web and they pretty much have any dummy you could want and they are very inexpensive.

Hi Donna,
Could you pm me the message you just sent over. The name of the company was blocked. Maybe it will come through if you pm it to me.
Thanks,
Karen

you can buy dummies @ taylorfoam dot com, they're one of the cheapest. Just ice the dummy like you would any other cake. To take off the sharp coners you can file them or use sand paper

i apply the bc directly to the dummy all the time. easy to do ... easy to clean up.

If you want to reuse the dummy are you able to? What do you do - just scrape off the old icing and re-ice? What do you do if you don't want to reuse it for a while? Jsut leave the old icing on it and store in a container? Can the dumies be wiped clean or washed (I knowt hat sounds stupid) - but I was wondering.

Just soak the dummy in hot soapy water and the icing/fondant will begin to disolve. You can scrape carefully with a firm plastic spatula if you want to speed up the process.

All I do for storage is lightly cover it with a plastic bag and store in a cool place.

Thanks for the response Indydebi & dsilvest. I think I am going to invest in a couple of dummies for a Wilton class. I want to brush up on my piping skills or should say lack of skills and I don't want to be baking any cakes and hauling it to work before I go to class.

Can I ask one more question... how do you secure them to a board and what do you do if you want to stack them?

I just use a dollop of BC to hold it onto the board. WHen stacked, the icing on top of the tier will hold the upper tier in place just fine. And when I'm doing a dummy, I save icing by not icing the middle of the cake ... I only ice where it's going to show.