I have my first wedding cake coming up and she wants a three tiered square cake that sits offcentered (the squares) and feeds 230 people. A year ago when she came in for her tasting and to pick her cake out I was relying on a chart that was dead wrong for servings based on sizes. And now I am racking my brain trying to come up with a three tier combo that will work for her servings! The offseting of the tiers is throwing me off...I have made a paper template for just about every size 20 and under...and they either overlap horribly when I try to "stack" them, or I use smaller sizes on top of one another and then I don't come up with enough servings!!! Please help!!

You can always go with the sizes you originally chose and make them double barreled. That would be double the servings of the original cake. Make sure you use cake boards every 4" and proper support to avoid collapse. 230 is quite an undertaking for a first time. Good luck to you.

You could make a sheet cake or two. That would bump up your servings without adding too much time and expense.

That's the problem...the original sizes that we chose did not equal the amount of servings that the chart stated. And on top of that the original sizes won't work when you try to stack them (by offsetting them) they overlap. I guess I didn't realize how much space you need between sizes when you are stacking them that way.

These are the diagonal lengths of squares


4  5.656854249
5  7.071067812
6  8.485281374
7  9.899494937
8  11.3137085
9  12.72792206
10  14.14213562
11  15.55634919
12  16.97056275
13  18.38477631
14  19.79898987
15  21.21320344
16  22.627417
17  24.04163056
18  25.45584412
19  26.87005769
20  28.28427125
21  29.69848481
22  31.11269837

So you could have an 6" 10" 16" which is 196 servings.
Or 8" 12" 18" which is 266 servings.

This is Wiltons Serving chart

http://www.wilton.com/wedding/wedding-cakes/wedding-cake-data.cfm

I think sheetcakes are the best suggestion. Still make the 3 tiered sq cake but make sheetcakes to make up the servings required. The sheetcakes would be in the kitchen, so when the tiered cake gets cut so would the sheetcakes. The bride gets the tiered cake she wants and you provide the servings required. You also get to stop stressing some much. HTH

I learnt this lesson (offset square cakes don't stack as you'd think) just recently. I ended up cutting the cake to fit, but luckily I still had servings needed.
Good luck

Thank you for elaborating on my suggestion. I am still new to posting comments so I am not quite sure how much to say. When I got married I could not afford to buy more than a simple three tiered cake (this was eighteen years ago) so my baker suggested the sheet cake in the same flavor for more servings. All of the cake was cut and plated in the kitchen and no one could tell the difference once the cake was on the plate.