I was suppose to have the cake ready today, but it was a mess. I baked 2 13 x9 cakes (using betty crocker french vanilla), cut each in have and stacked on top of each other to make the cake about 8 inches tall. I couldn't get enough fondant rolled out to cover the whole thing so I did it by section. Now the who thing looks like the leaning tower of piza...I even used dowels, but they are even showing through the fondant now b/c the cake settled. Uh, I've got to have it by tomorrow and I have no clue what to do. I made the cake twice last night and the same thing happened with both.

I dont know if this tutorial will help you. But it's worth looking at.

http://sweetthings-toronto.blogspot.com/2010/04/purse-cake-tutorial.html

Also could you have it laying down?

Are you using boards between every 4" of cake and leveling each layer? Are all the dowels cut the exact same height? Where are the dowels showing through? They should only be on the bottom two layers so shouldn't show through the top. Do you hava a photo?

Did you have a cardboard separating every two layers? I've never made a purse cake but sounds like you should have stacked and filled two layers, then put in dowels, and then set the other two stacked and filled layers (on their own cardboard) on top. Can you remove the fondant, unstack and dowel, and then redo?

When I've made my purse cakes I didn't use a board between but I used a dense cake, the mix cakes are pretty squishy so the board might be necessary the next thing I did is once stacked I carved it wider at the bottom to smaller at top about 1/2" so it created some support at the bottom still looking like a purse. As for the dowels showing through at the top why don't you add a piece of fondant to replicate the flap to close the purse or you could add a rectangle at the top with the zipper in the center?? It's hard to make recommendations without seeing your cake. Good luck!!

I have used BC for my purses but I bake & let them sit at least overnight before stacking. Freshly baked cakes are to soft to stack IMHO. If there is any way to wait till in the morning to finish that is what I would do.

I baked mine the night before dh cake mix , in a 11x15 sheet pan , cut into 1/3's and stacked didnt use boards . But I let sit stacked for about 10 hours before I put dowels in it just for support and the iced and covered pic is in my photos .

I had the same problems with my coach purse cake yesterday! (maybe it's just coach that's a problem )
Another issue I had was that all of a sudden the fondant on the back of the purse became very sticky and started bubbling out. I've never had a problem like this before in all of my other cakes so it made me extremely nervous! We had a very strange weather day with sunny weather to severe storms in a matter of minutes so perhaps it was the humidity that did me in?

I ended up cutting a cakeboard and putting it against the backside (hot glued to the bottom board) to keep my cake from leaning and then recovered it in fondant. It was a disaster but turned out really well!

http://www.cakecentral.com/cake-photo_1848185.html

I hope yours turned out nicely too

If you're stacking over 4 inches, you really, really, do need boards and dowels. The dowels support the upper tier so that the bottom cake has no additional weight on it.

Dowels stuck thru 8 inches of cake aren't really supporting anything.

Rae