AHi there! I'm new to cake central and am excited to see and hear about all the wonderful cakes on this site. I've been doing cakes for about 3 years now and love it! My only issue is that I would love to be making more cakes. How do I get the practice? Is making dummy cakes a good idea?

You can certainly use a dummy cake - or volunteer to make cakes for everyone you know.  :)  When I was learning I brought cakes/cupcakes/cookies to every neighbor, teacher, birthday party, school function, etc....

AI gave a way a lot of cake when I was learning! Cake dummies are alright, but I preferred to practice on real cake for a couple of reasons. First of all, they don't really behave the same as real cake. They are lighter, so they can move around on you which is irritating, but they are also firm enough that you can get used to doing things that you will never get away with on real cake. In my mind, it didn't make sense to practice on something that would have me forming habits I would have to change later. Secondly, by using real cake I got to experiment with cake recipes right along with decorating practice. And by giving the cakes away I got a lot of feedback on what recipes people liked the best.

I wanted to ask you guys something since we are on the subject of dummy cakes. A bakery I know of lets the head cake decorator use real cakes as displays in the cake shop, I asked the owner why she didn't use foam ones as they would be more cost effective. The cake decorator pipes in and says " I don't like working with foam because its unrealistic". My question is would any of you actually do this?

AHard to say for sure what I would do in the situation because, let's face it, armchair shop-running is much easier than actual shop-running, but I think I would use real cakes for display for much the same reason. Also, because if it was real cake I would be forced to change up my display more often; I've seen too many old and dusty window displays in my town!

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