I seem to be having problems icing my cakes. I am using Indydebi's BC which I love. I do a crumb coat and let it completely crust because I crumb coat in the am and do my final ice in the pm. I use the Viva method to smooth. For some reason, the frosting on the bottom half of my cake is wrinkling, sagging, buckling! It has become a problem only on the cakes I've done the past couple of months. I can't figure out what I am doing differently.

I am trying to determine if I am putting too much icing on my final coat or if my icing is too thin or if it's something else??? I use the icer tip. I also make the BC with 1/2 cup of milk.

I have a cake to make next week for which I will be using a damask stencil so I really need the frosting to be completely smooth!!!

I (hopefully) attached a pic from a recent cake to show you what I mean.

Any tips or advice is greatly appreciated

Ok...can't get the picture to attach so I put it in my gallery.

http://cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1843431

I love your animals btw, but as for the sagging- mine has done that before as well, I think one thing was that I didn't let my cakes settle and the other was too much icing. I was so afraid to play with my crumb coat that I left more on and it buckled like that.

I use the same icing - I have never tried it with milk - I always use water!
I also have never crumb coated - maybe try that next time... ?
Sorry.. just thinking of why it could do that???

i would say cut back on the milk by a tablespoon or two. during the summer, my BC needed 5 T of milk...during the fall, i need 4 T of milk, so you might need to cut back a bit? also, my crumb coat is very thin...you can still see the flavor of the cake through it thin. i don't wait for it to crust. instead, i get it as smooth as i can, pop it in the fridge for 15 minutes to harden a bit. and then i put on my final coat of BC. i find that a 1/4 inch of icing is ideal and doesn't cause sagging. so less milk, and maybe a more narrow top coat and your problem should be better

Settling was also my first thought. when I looked at the cake, it looked like the top layer was sticking out further from teh bottom layer? were these cakes the exact same size? (Sometimes one may shrink a bit more than the other ... I've had it happen.) If so, was there enough icing to fill in "the gap"?

Thanks for the feedback! I crumb coat my cakes in the morning around 9am and then final ice around 9pm, so I think they are settling ok. I'm not sure about the sizes, I hadn't thought about that. In this case they were both 6 inch rounds, but I can't remember if one shrank more than the other. Would you trim the larger one in that case, or just put more frosting on the smaller one? I seem to have trouble putting my icing on evenly. I'm using a bench scraper and the icer tip, so clearly it is user-error

Maybe I do also need to cut back a little on the milk because this definitely seems to be happening as of late. Although I'm in Florida and it's almost as hot now as it was in August!!

Question...should my crumb coat be thin enough to see through or should I be covering my cake completely? Maybe I just have too much icing on there! Also, how soon after putting on the final icing should I use the Viva. Should I wait just long enough that it doesn't stick or should I wait until it's fairly dry?

Thank you all so much for your help!

A crumb coat is just meant to catch all of the crumbs and seal them to the cake. It is usually quite thin where you can see the color of the cake through the crumb coat.

I had this same problem back in the spring. It usually happened on cakes with a really bright colored buttercream-like your electric green cake. . I decided that all the coloring was making the bc a little thinner than usual. I started cutting back on the milk in bc that I was going to add a lot of color to.
Also I make sure that my cakes have settled overnight or for several hours with a weight on top.

Also, if it does turn out, that one cake is a bit smaller than the other, make sure the slighlty larger on is on the bottom, if you don't want to trim them for fear of getting them uneven. that way the bc from the top part, where you have a bit more to even out the cakes puts the weight on the cake on the bottom and not on bc, which would make it sag. If you have the smaller one on the bottom, then you need more bc on the bottom, but the weight of it will make it slip and slide. Make your bc a tad more stiff, some colours make it a bit softer as well, I find especially the electric colours

Thank you all! This was my first time using the electric colors so I can certainly see where that would make a difference. I think I will try less milk next time and definitely will work on getting my crumb coat thinner as it seems that I am making it too thick. I really appreciate all the advice