I am designing a mountain top cake grooms cake. The base cakes are 3 layers of 12x12, 2 layers 10x10, 2 layers of 9x9, then two layers of 7/38" oblong and finally 2 layers 6 inch round on the top. The top layers are stacked to the right similar to a staircase. The mountaineer cake topper will stand on the top. The cake stands a bit over 1 foot tall. As I will be carving crags and cliffs into the cake do you think I should use separators and dowel rods during construction so the cake won't collapse or just stack the all layers together and carve them down.
I'm using Collette Peter's Coco Loco cake which is very dense and easy to carve.
Absolutely use supports. That is way too much cake to be stacking on top of one another. And transporting without dowels between the tiers and a center dowel support will be a total nightmare. My niece tried this, and ended up with cake all over the trunk of her car.
Theresa
Exactly what Theresa said. Anything over 6 inches of cake should have internal supports.
I made a cake for my DD's b-day last week. I had originally planned it to be just 2 layers, but the layers did not turn out as deep as I wanted, so I added another layer at the last minute, and didn't put in supports. The cake frosted up nicely at first, but as it sat, I could see that it was sagging from the weight.
Fortunately, we ate it before it got too bad, and no one else noticed, but I will NEVER do that again without supports! ( I have always used supports for anything over 2 layers in the past, but because it was for DD, and because the layers were so thin, I thought I was OK!)
If you look in my photos, it is the first cake at the top (green with purple bow). You could already tell it was sagging at the corners at this point!
Yes, use supports! You will wish you had. Better to have them and not need them, than need them and not have them!
Cake is heavy. Use supports. You wouldn't want an unexpected avalanche feature to appear on your mountain!
Most definitely use supports. I made a cake this weekend and ended up having to lay it on it's side because I hadn't properly support it. I was so disappointed.
Thank you all for your "support". I guess as I'm carving through the cakes I'll just use a really sharp knife to cut through the cake boards.
Maybe you could make your boards smaller than what you begin with so that when you carve you don't have to carve through the board. I wouldn't make them much smaller but enough. I hope that you understand cause sometimes i type and it is not the thought that i am trying to convey.
Either make the boards a bit smaller than the layers or stack it all up without filling, carve, unstack, trace the carved cakes on foamcore, cut out boards, fill, then stack with dowels and boards in place, and frost.
When I did my volcano cake, I used boards that were smaller, and it saved me a lot of extra work.
Theresa
Yep, Texas_Rose has the right answer!!!! Supports are THE most important thing with a cake this size! Hope everything comes out okay for you!!!
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