I will be doing a cake in the next few weeks that is to be a realistic size "ice bucket". What/how much support should go into this cake? Thanks in advance for any tips!

Bump

Your support will depend entirely on how many cakes you stack up. If you plan to stack 4 cakes, you need to use dowels in the bottom two layers, and then add cardboard on top before adding the rest of the layers. You use the dowels exactly as you do for any stacked cake.

The cardboard also makes the serving easier--you slice from the top down and serve off the cardboard, and then take it off to slice the rest of the cake.