Hi All,

I am going to be making my own wedding cake in a couple of months and I would like to make a head start on the top tier which will be a dummy cake.

I want to make a royal icing cage, and thought great this could be something I can do in advance. However, I made some other royal icing decorations the other day, and unfortunately with the rain we've been having they melted. (they were in a container). 

This got me thinking, do I risk the fact it could crumble (and be stressing about this possibility) or is there another option. The ideas which have gone through my head are:

- Can I seal royal icing so that moisture does not affect it?
- Non edible product that could be piped like royal icing?

Has anyone had any experience on this, knows of something that would dry hard like royal icing buy wont melt?

I have read some topics on spackle, but not sure I should be putting dried spackle sitting on top of a real cake. Unless I could put something between the dummy cake and the real cake below so the spackle doesn't touch the real cake.

Many thanks in advance for your suggestions/recommendations!

Lynette

Congratulations for your wedding!  What sort of box did you put the royal icing into?  It should be non-airtight or moisture can collect on the icing.  Putting some kitchen paper underneath the pieces of piping helps attract the moisture away from the icing - you might want to replace the paper every so often so it's still absorbent.  I’ve heard of people putting packets of silica gel under the kitchen paper (taking care not to let them touch the icing as they aren’t foodsafe) but haven’t tried this myself.  Hope this helps – if not I’ll have to let someone more experienced than me answer your question! 

ALynnette, maybe you could make the cage with gumpaste? Use a Styrofoam cage to shape the gumpaste. Cover styrofoam with shortening to stop gumpaste adhering to it. Leave for a few days to a week. Also make the base of the cage separately. Put holes in the base where the bars will be so when you assemble it all together, the bars can be glued into the holes. Hope I'm making sense!