Just wondering: What happens to the cakes entered in these contests after the show is over? Are they available for sale? Given to food pantries? Or do the contestants take them back home?

Most cakes (not all) that are entered into competition are dummy cakes. They will usually go home with the person that made them.

I'm not totally sure but I think the only ones that have to be done with cake are the carved ones. You can use dummy cakes as your cakes as long as the design can be done in real cake.

Alot of those cakes are worked on for weeks or months, so if there was real cake in there you wouldn't want to eat it. Plus after it has traveled hundreds of miles and sat in a room with hundreds of people for several days pass on it too.

I know that the cakes I have taken to the conventions (which aren't judged) are fake and I could never imagine carrying a real cake stacked and decorated that distance at all. Carry the fake ones is stressful enough. About 30 mins into the trip to St Charles I finally just has to let it go and say what will happen will happen and I'll try to fix it when I get there. Thankfully only one flower broke and a part of my bow, but I was able to turn it around and not worry about it.

I save (most) of my cakes from competition and took them to a business expo yesterday. It wasn't my original plan but I couldn't get rid of most of them and now that I've opened my business, I use them as display cakes. The ones I didn't keep, I removed the decorations and reused the cake dummies for other dummy cakes.

Thank you all, for taking the time to answer my question. I am a newbie and love this website. The creativity of you all is amazing! WOW, WOW,WOW!