Hi all. I am in need of some serious help!!! I am doing a wedding cake for tomorrow morning...it's now 11:27PM and I can't even get the top tier to work for me. I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO. It is a red velvet cake with cream cheese icing (crusting...Edna's), then a thickened some of it to make a dam, put a little on the bottom of each layer (to keep the filling from making the cake soggy) then added the strawberry whipped cream filling. OMG!!!!! I can't get the dam to stay, the filling keeps coming out, I can't smooth it, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO????!!!!!!! Please see the pics and get back to me with any tips or ideas...PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!

Well, umgrzfn...you've got a real mess there. I'd scrape off some of the excess buttercream and just cover the thing in rolled fondant. But, since it's due in the morning, you probably don't have fondant on hand.
In that case, I think I'd start again from scratch, get rid of all the icing and filling, then make a new batch of crusting buttercream, perhaps add some strawberry preserves for a filling. Let us know how all this turns out. I've had some disasters myself, so I know what you're going through.

It sounds to me like the dam is too soft.

Whip up some gross frosting (powdered sugar and butter) and make it really stiff, and use that for the dam, then frost with the icing you want.

The creamcheese is too warm and the cake is too soft. (I've had this problem before), scraping, chilling the cake and frosting over again cold helps. If you don't have time to chill or want to ensure a clean cake, then I'd start over. Use a dam as described above as you definitely won't have time to chill with a new cake.

You can also add lots of powdered sugar to your icing until it's really thick (almost like dough consistency) and use that too pipe your dam.

Good luck.

I know this may be too late now to help you, but you mentioned the filling is a "strawberry whipped cream"............is it a stabilized whipped cream?

It looks like it may have "melted" once the layers were added.

So how did this turn out, since it's morning now? Hopefully everything worked out for you.

Yes, I would have stabilized the whipped cream first. The only thing I can think of to salvage the whole thing is to use ganache under fondant. It will form a shell that could possibly help.

If I were you, I would have baked a new cake.

Since it's now Sat. Aug.1st...I'm wondering how your cake turned out. Were any of the suggestions able to help you? Do you perhaps have some new pictures of the completed cake that you can post? I'm sure everyone is wondering what you did.

Thanks all for your replies!! I didn't even think of Ganache Rylan!!! Probably would have fixed it....also....I will NEVER make a whipped cream filling EVER AGAIN!!!!!! I did make the dam so thick I could actually form it with my fingers, but still didn't help! I ended up doing just a 2 inch tier, put it in the fridge for a few hours and then covered with fondant. Once the cake started to warm up a bit, it still bulged, but kinda made it look "like that's how it was suppose to be" I REALLY wish I would have thought about the ganache, and then just the "gross" frosting! Probably would have helped quite a bit. I also noticed that for some reason, the red velvet cake was so much harder to work with than the chocolate or the vanilla. All three were made from the WASC recipe, just with the different box mixes. Here's the final project, set up at the venue. The description of everything I did is in my photos. Thanks again EVERYONE!!!!!!

[quote="dkelly"]I know this may be too late now to help you, but you mentioned the filling is a "strawberry whipped cream"............is it a stabilized whipped cream?

Deb what should you use to stabilize whipped cream?

[quote="lthiele"]

Usually unflavored gelatin....here's a link to a recipe for you to look at.

http://www.cakecentral.com/cake_recipe-1925-stabilized-whipped-cream.html

HTH

[quote="dkelly
Usually unflavored gelatin....here's a link to a recipe for you to look at.

http://www.cakecentral.com/cake_recipe-1925-stabilized-whipped-cream.html

HTH [/quote]

Printed and in the recipe folder - thank you so much!