I am doing a cake at the end of september for a womens conference at church. The theme is the parable of the ten virgins. The cake needs to be for approx 200 people. I would love any ideas you have for decorating. The only thing they said was they wanted it to be sort of like a wedding cake...in other words, they want tiers. Any ideas??

What's the parable?

In the Parable of the Ten Virgins the story is told by Jesus of a party of virgins given the honour of attending a wedding. Each of the ten virgins is carrying a lamp as they await the coming of the bridegroom. Five are wise and bring a jar of oil. Five are foolish and they took no oil with them. The bridegroom is late in coming; the foolish virgins ask the wise ones for spare oil, but the others refuse, saying that they might then not have enough. While the foolish virgins are away buying more oil, the bridegroom arrives. The wise virgins are there to welcome him and the foolish ones arrive too late and are excluded. - Wikipedia

If you are able to sculpt the 10 women you could put 5 on the bottom tier with black lanterns and 5 on the top tier with lit lanterns.

Or... you could do a hexagon shaped cake and paint one woman on each panel, again with lanterns lit/unlit. You could paint them to look like stained glass. Maybe a cross on top?

I dont have an idea, but our pastor just preached on this a couple of sunday's ago! Just thought it was awesome that i actually knew the story! The ultimate lesson is 'are you prepared?' maybe think along those lines? i will be brainstorming cause this is interesting!

What if you made 10 oil lamps out of fondant (either sculpted in 3-D, or rolled and cut out), painted them with gold pearl dust (so they glimmer), and then made frosting "flames" on five of them? If you rolled the fondant flat and cut them out, you could place them around the sides of the cake tiers.
You could also find 5 small bud vases or other decorative glass containers. Right before you set it out to be oohed and aahed over, you pour a little oil in each container. Then you set those on top of the tier or all five on the top tier.