help! i'm going to be doing a friend's wedding cake next month...she wants the garden terraces cake from the 08 wilton yearbook, the one that uses the new paisley pan set. the wilton set is 3 pans. but i just found the fat daddios comma pan set--5 pans--for not much more money, so i'd rather buy those. even though i only need 3 for this cake i'd rather have 5 to choose from in the future, you know?

so here's the problem...the wedding is next month, i've already quoted a price and figured everything out based on the wilton pans, which are different sizes than fat daddios. so do you think that if i substitute fat daddios' 14, 10, and 6" pans for wilton's approximately 17, 12, and 9, it would be waaaay less servings? i can't find a serving chart for any of these pans to compare directly and i suck at math. it does seem a lot smaller. i wish the fat daddio's biggest pan was bigger than 14"!

links to both pan sets:

http://www.fatdaddios.com/comma_set.htm
http://www.wilton.com/store/site/product.cfm?sku=2105-4039&killnav=1

a pic of the cake, let's see if i can figure out how to attach it...

any thoughts or advice are appreciated!!!

That's a lovely cake. If you buy the FD pans (I would) then you could make a slab cake to go with it to make up the servings. Or you could add a tier if you are buying five pans. HTH

Thank you lorrieg!

it's a huge wedding so i'm already doing 2 sheet cakes to go with this...i could do another one, i suppose. i just worry that the cake would LOOK smaller and be, like, unimpressive somehow because it's small. this is my first wedding cake, i just want it to be awesome!

which 4 pans would you use to do a 4-tier? the sizes are 14, 12, 10, 8, 6. it seems odd to me to have an 8" on top. and do you think it would look good with an extra tier or would it throw off the overall proportions somehow?

TIA for any help anybody has. i don't know what i'd do without CC!

Since it's for a friend would you be able to make all five? That would look absolutely amazing! I haven't figured it out but it might give you roughly the same servings give or take.

You could also wait until you get the pans and stack them and see what you like. You could still do flowers on three levels and maybe extend them if you thought it needed it.

Another idea would be to use the five, buy black 1" or bigger ribbon and wrap the bottom, middle and top tiers with it over the fondant. Only put the flowers on the two other tiers. Five layers of the black flowers might be a bit much.

If you are just using four I'd use the four biggest. 8" in paisly is not like an 8" round or square.

Oooh, this sounds so wonderful!

ooh, i like the idea of alternating ribbon and the piped flowers on each tier! i was thinking 5 tiers might be really nice too and yes she is a friend...she chose the cake from the wilton book but pretty much told me to do what i want and that she didn't want to interrupt my "artistic instinct."

well i think i'm ordering the FD pans, and then i'll play with them and see how they look. i'll probably be back with more questions! thanks again!! i'm getting excited now.

keep us posted! I'd love to have a reason to do that cake.

Just an FYI.... the wiltion pans sides slant that make it a pain to torte where as FD does not.....

HTH
michelle

thanks michelle! i haven't used FD pans before but have heard the quality is much better than wilton. so i'm excited to finally have a reason to buy a set.

She's right. I had not thought of the sides of the pans. Wilton's decorator pans have straight sides usually but I've never seen their paisly ones to see if they are straight or not.

I just did a mess of cakes with my fat daddios and had no problems at all. I bake at 325F now and it makes a huge difference.

May I ask, for those who have the Fat Daddios set, how many servings do you get per pan? Baking 2 - 2" layers per tier, making it a 4" tall cake.

Any info would be appreciated, thanks!

I did end up buying the FD pans. I posted the finished cake here:
http://www.cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1263412

One thing I found out is that the measurements I posted in the original post were incorrect...well, they were correct but not how I thought. The site I got the measurements from listed the largest as 14". Well, it's actually 14"x20" at the widest and longest points. The Wilton measurements were the length, adn the FD were the width, if that makes any sense. So in reality teh FD pans are BIGGER.

As for servings, I really have no idea. I made the wedding cake, it served everybody it needed to serve. But maybe knowing the actual dimensions will help somebody figure it out.

Thanks for the info and link! Your cake turned out beautiful!!!! Congrats on that! Thanks again!

I just got the Paisley pans from wilton the other day. I think that i like the FD Comma pans better. Thank goodness that I kept my AC moore receipt. Im gonna take them back and get these.

Thank you for the link to the site.

Denise

I hate to dredge up an old post, but I am going to buy the Fat Daddios comma pans, and I really really really need to know how many they serve. I need 300 servings (not including top tier) and was wondering if all 5 (or the 4 smaller ones rather) tiers would serve that many. It's not a problem if they don't, cause I will just make extra to get that many servings. But I had the consult today and I quoted her for 300 servings, but told her I would need to find out the exact servings of the pans because it may be a little less or a little more. I need to give her an exact price by Monday so she can give me the deposit. I can't find anywhere that lists the servings, and I can't go by Wilton because the pans aren't the same sizes. Even if the person on here who has that set could look at them and kind of guesstimate the servings, that would be great. Thanks so much in advance!