I have just been asked to do a wedding cake for 450 guests. This is by far the largest cake I've attempted. The bride said I can use sheet cake for some, but I'm not sure how big to make the tiered cake... what sizes do you use? She wants 3-4 tiers. How tall would something like that end up being. Could someone send a pic of what a cake this size looks like. (its so hard to tell how big some cakes are in pics)
thanks for all the help!!

I am sure others will chime in, but there are some good charts on cake servings that will help you. I would do a 4 tier 12/10/8/6 or something similar you like- servings will depend on if these are round, square, or some other shape, then fill in the other servings you need with kitchen cakes. Look at some pics of tiered cakes that say the sizes so you can decide what look you want.

How tall are typical tiers?
How thick should each cake layer be 1"..2"..3"?
How many layers should there be?
Does it depend on the type of cake your making?

Are 450 guests invited or is that figure based off of confirmed RSVPs? Typically if 450 invitations were extended at the very most you are looking at 3/4 of those people showing up and in most cases far less. So best case senario, MAYBE 340 guests will be there and it's even more likely that it will be less. I know some brides can't even think of the possibility that someone may not be able to attend their most wonderous event but the facts don't lie. Just about every wedding I've done a cake for where the bride was insistent that the cake be enough to serve all the people invited, there was always TONS of cake left over, like 100 servings or more left over! Of course from a business standpoint, I guess you'd want to sell as much cake as possible- but you should probably discuss with the bride and find out if that figure is based off of invites or RSVPs.

I usually make each layer of cake 2" and torte/fill it. A normal tier is typically 4"-6", so 2-3 layers, but since you are new to this I would go with 4" - 2 layers. If you have two layers, each of them torted (cut in half horizontally) and filled, and you fill in between the 2 layers you put together, then you will have 3 layers of filling in each tier. With all the filling it can get taller than 4" but if you don't want it to then just make your cakes shorter than 2". If you are afraid of torting you can always make 1" cakes and layer 4 of them- you will just have more baking.

MadameRaz is right, you need to find out if 450 is the total invited because there is NO WAY all of them will be there and it is a waste of your time to make a bunch of cake no one will eat.

I LOVE a big tall grand wedding cake!!! A 6/8/10/12/14/16 cake will serve 318. (rounds) Square cakes get more servings per cake.

Square: 6/10/14/16 will serve 18/50/98/128 = 294
Round: 6/10/14/16 will serve 12/38/78/100 = 228

2-layer 12x18's will serve approx 100.

You can also shove two of the 2-layer 12x18 together to make a 2-layer 18x24 base and then stack the tiered cake on top of that. That's an awesome look.

But definitely find out if the 450 is the total number invited or her expected head count. And if its her expected headcount, find out how many she invited. My rule that has worked for 30 years is 60% of those INVITED will actually show up. And the bigger the invite list, the more accurate the formula.