Newbie Layered Cake Question
Decorating By michellejune Updated 20 Jul 2010 , 2:32am by VeronicaLuis
Hi Everyone! I'm a long time lurker on this board and have gotten so many great ideas and have spent HOURS looking at the gallery.
This weekend I'm making a luau cake for my son's first birthday party and had a quick question.
The cake is going to be a layered 12 inch and 8 inch cake and I am wondering if I'm supposed to bake 2- 12 inch and 2 - 8 inch cakes to layer on each other or just make one 12 and one 8 and cut them for layers? I'm concerned they will be too short if I don't stack 2 cakes?
Thanks in advance!!!
To make it tall enough, usually each tier is two baked layers. If you make each tier two layers, then you need supports for the top tier...a board and dowels. That keeps it from sinking into the bottom cake and also makes serving a lot easier.
Thank you! I'm glad I asked because someone told me I didn't need dowels in a 2 tiered cake but it makes sense if I bake 2 of each size it will be heavy.
I wondered what torting was! I'm not planning to cut them so I guess I'm doing tiers but not torting 
Torting is when you cut a cake horizontally in half to then put filling. So if you bake 2 12" cakes, you'll torte each of the 2 cakes to give you 4 layers of cake and 3 layers of filling. So you will have 2 layers of cake and one layer of filling per tier correct? You may not get to 4" without torting if that matters to you.
I usually do torte my cakes when I do 8 or 9 inch bday cakes but since I'm doing 2 tiers and it's a kids cake I think I'm thinking I may just keep it simple and do 2 cakes and one filling for each size. But I may change my mind. It is very impressive looking when you cut into a cake and there is lots of layers!
I'm gonna look up the SPS system now!
My 2 cents worth of advice is, I hate dowel, it's two hard to cut. I use bubble tea straws, I get them on Ebay they are strong yet easy to cut with a pair of scissors. All the tiered cakes I've done have been with bubble tea straws and I haven't had any disasters (knock on wood). The straws go into the cake and they end up with cake inside them (kind of like a core sample) so no cake gets displaced as appose to a dowel.
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