This weekend was my first disaster cake experience. I made two, 3 layer cakes for separate parties and they both did not hold up. The first cake was made of a 10", 8" and topped with a giant cupcake. tiered and iced with satin ice fondant. after stacking all three cakes, I inserted two dowels through the entire cakes. The cake held up fine for the few hours before it got picked up but I noticed that the fondant was starting to sag and looked like elephant skin on the bottom edges of the cake. I was just told that the cake fell at the party. The top fell over. I am so embarrased, but lukily the cake was free.

The other cake I did was much larger, 16" 10" and 8" all double layered, covered with satin ice fondant. I was done with the cake at least 2 hours before the party started and noticed that my bottom cake started to sink on the sides. I doweled the entire cake as always, the center didn't go in but the sides looked as though someone pushed it down. What could have happened?

Wait, do you mean that you just put the two dowels through the cake from the top down, and no other dowels or boards?

Im thinking that with the first one with the sagging that the cake settled after it was covered. You said that yu doweled throught the center but did you dowel between each tier as well?

As for the 2nd, im not sure why only the sides smashed in and not the middle..hmm? Im curious to see what others think

Iv had a few disasters myself (one was 2 days ago) and i know how it can suck and bring you down but you just gotta remember that theres always the next cake. Good luck!

I dowelled the bottom layer to support the middle then dowelled the middle to support the top. Since the cake was going to be transported, I stacked two long dowells from the top down to the bottom tier to keep it from falling. It seemed as though the satin ice didn't hold up and got too soft. My cakes are dense and i've never had this happen when using MMF.

So did you have a board under each cake?

Also, how many dowels did you use to support the layers? Too many dowels can weaken the middle.

How long were the dowels? If they made it to where the cake "sat" down into the next cake, that compromises it too. You want the tiers to set just on top of each other.

What kind of dowels? This is why I like bubble tea straws too, they don't displace the cake like a regular dowel does.

Each cake had a board underneath it. I used 9 dowels to support the 12" cake and 7 to support the 8" cake. When I pushed the dowels through, I did notice that it didn't level off at the top of the fondant, it seemed lower than the fondant layer.....did that make any sense? Could that be it? Maybe because the dowels were below the fondant layer, it allowed the cake above it to push down into the fondant.

Thank you all for comments....I hope that I will be able to avoid this situation on my future cakes. I'm starting to get discourage about stacking cakes again.