I have been asked to do a top hat cake. It will have to be carved. It is to look like the hat in the recent Alice in Wonderland movie that Johnny Dep is wearing. I have NEVER carved a cake before so I am wondering. What kind of cake carves best? Where should I place dowels? The cake will go from small to large and how best should I support this cake! Looking forward to the challenge but intimidated? Thanks for any help or suggestions!

i just made one and used 3 8x2 cakes and a 9x2 cake. The movie hat has a real sharp curve to it which can collapse under the weight of the fondant. I didn't make mine so sharp. I used the WASC cake, works lovely. You'll need to get the brim made so it can dry i used a 12" cake pan to draw around for the size with the cakes i used. It in my pics.

WASC carves really well like SweetCakes mentioned. I made a Mad Hatter Cake but with Chiffon Cake that I froze for about 2 hours before carving it and it held up well too. I didn't use any dowels since it was only 6" tall and covered in ganache. I'm going to make another one next week and want to try drying out the rim curved up like the real hat. I didn't do it on this one since I had a coating of ganache over the fondant rim and was not too sure on how well the rim will hold its shape with the ganache and in 90+ weather....it ended up doing fine.

Here is mine: http://cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1781497

I also posted a step by step here: http://sugarsweetcakesandtreats.blogspot.com/2010/08/mad-hatter-hat-cake.html

Angelfood4, your cakes and blog came up when i did a google search, they were a great help to me, thank you.