Hi! I'm doing my first wedding cake this week (not as a professional), and I just finished baking up the cakes. Most of the cake being served will come from sheet cakes kept in the kitchen, but I'm doing a two tier simply decorated cake to display and for the couple to cut. The bottom tier is a 10" round and the top tier is an 8" round - they'll be stacked with dowels for support.

The recipe I used produced two 10" cake layers, and three 8" cake layers. My question is, would you recommend I use two or three cake layers in the 8" cake tier? Just an fyi, the 10" layers baked up to about 2" each, whereas the 8" layers are more like 1.5" each.

Just curious as to what is traditionally done and/or what experienced bakers on here would choose to do. Thanks for your help!

It could be either way. Using all 3 layers for the top tier would give you more height, obviously, and therefore a little more drama. I would use all of them. If you torte each layer, of course, it adds even more height.

The smaller the diameter(sp?) of the cake the taller it is going to look.
Using two 1.5" layers w/filling and icing will actually look good

You also could torte one of the 8" layers and add it to the other two so it does come out 4" tall
The let your family enjoy a treat of the remaining part.

Each tier is usually 4 inch's high. Bake two of each size cake, fill the middle with butter cream or filling, stack them and crumb coat. You want each tier the same height. When I am making wedding cakes I usually have batter left over, I make cupcakes to use the remaining so its not wasted. A great treat for my kids. Good Luck!

Unless you are going for different sizes of heights, I'd try to make them similar. You can trim the 8in pieces and make three layers of cake, that would equal about the same as your bottom layer.

Are your 8in pans shorter, or did you not put enough batter in each to get a full 2 in layer?

Thanks for the tips everyone! I hadn't gotten far enough in my thought process to remember that once I level the cakes I'll lose some of their depth (thank goodness I'm still just an amateur baker ). I think I will go ahead and move forward with leveling all of them, and from there see which combo will give me the closer height match to my 10" tier.

As for why they ended up smaller, I suppose the recipe was for a cake pan with 1.5" sides, as it says it makes three 8" layers. So even though I have 8"x2" pans they didn't bake up to 2". Now I know for next time.

Next time, I'd just put three cups of batter (what an 8in pan calls for) in two pans rather than spread it all out between three.

For my cakes, each tier has four layers of cake, three layers of filling. Each cake layer is 7/8" tall.

The way I roll is that the tiers either have to be exactly the same height or they have to be very different heights. Tiers that are slightly different heights (say 4" and 5") look to me like the baker isn't precise (unless you're going for a graduated look from tier to tier among several tiers). Whereas if the heights are very different, (say 3 1/2" and 6") it looks more like a design choice.