I am making a dummy cake for a wedding i am doing and I want to know how early i can make this cake? Will it look brittle and dry by wedding time? How do you store dummy cakes and keep them looking fresh?

I covered a dummy with fondant in June and it still looks great except the Hot Pink color has faded/dulled a bit. It just sits in a big closet with my cake stuff.

depending on the colors, you can make a dummy cake days, weeks, months or a couple of years ahead of time. There's nothing to "spoil". I use my regular icing minus the dream whip and minus the vanilla (we're not eating it, so save the money). It crusts as hard as concrete and I had dummy cakes for over 2 years that traveled to numerous bridal shows.

I think you're just not supposed to let it sit in a window where the sun would hit it as it will fade the colors. Also, I've seen some in bakeries that look dusty, eww. I stored mine for a couple months in a box in my pantry (until the ants found it)

you had ants on the dummies? I had mine sitting around for years and never had one bug at all. Even the dummy M&M cake that had real M&M's on it. Nadda.

Here's a weird story. When I moved to the shop with a BIG picture window, i set the cakes up in the window and my 6 tier white one started to fade to yellow. I thought I was going to have to ditch it and do another one, but I kept putting it off. So one day I checked it and the same sun that had turned it yellow, had eventually turned the yellow back to white!!! Crazy but true.