I am wondering what others do for two techniques:

1) When making a buttercream wedding cake (filling, crumb coat, and finish coat all buttercream) what are everyone's preferred timelines? For example, how long do you wait inbetween putting on the crumb coat before you put on the finish coat of buttercream?

2) I make fondant roses for most of my cakes, and I make them all by hand, but recently I have been looking at a lot of the rose silicone molds. Does anyone use these with regularity? I really do like my hand made roses, but they are very time consuming when putting 30-40 on a cake and am wondering if the silicone molds give the same effect?

Thanks so much for everyone's help!
Tracey

In my HUMBLE opinion - a mould will NEVER replace a beautiful hand-made gumpaste rose.

This is the part of our craft that I think NEEDS preserving - we need to keep the 'art' alive - too many cakes are coming out these days that look like they have been punched out by a factory robot