I am a novice cake decorator and I am entering a competition at the State Fair. It will be my first time using cake dummies and I have a few questions. 1)Should I coat them with shortening or plastic wrap to make icing removal easier? 2)If I use fondant, should I put royal icing underneath it? 3)I plan to stack the cake, so should I just hot glue the tiers? Or, do I still need to use dowels? Any other advice would be greatly appreciated. This will be my first time doing anything like this ... and will be only my 2nd tiered cake (I just started my Wilton Course 3, so I haven't even made one yet)! Thanks in advance, fellow CCers!

Make sure you smooth the edges so your fondant doesn't rip. I just roll mine on a table edge to deaded the sharp edge. I used buttercream under my fondant. The cake faded quite a bit after 2 weeks so I had to redo. The buttercream had to be prised off a bit, but mostly came off easily. I've heard of others covering their foam in plastic wrap. I'm going to try this on my next dummy.

I used dummies for the first time in my Celtic cake in my photos for a competition...I rubbed the dummy with shortening (thanks CCers!) and then covered in fondant...then attached the tiers to one another with royal icing. It was pretty easy to dismantle when I was done...although I think it was harder on me to dismantle all that work than it would have been to just cut and serve a real cake! Not sure why, but I hated destroying that thing! haha.

I have coated the dummies with shortening (very easy to remove the fondant later), but if it's a dummy I'm not going to dismantle for a while I will just run the dummy under tap water....shaking off the excess. The fondant will stick just fine!

I think most of the prep to cover them is preparing the dummy....dull the edges down and lightly sand it to remove any ridges! Good luck!

Thanks for your help, everyone!