I making a unicorn cake for tomorrow. I started doing the crumb coat, and I swear it is leaning. Are my eyes deceiving me, or do you see the lean?  What do I do if it is leaning! The cake is five layers stacked with butter cream and strawberry preserves filling between each layer. Should I have put some type of support in the middle? Is there a way to stop it from leaning more? I’m very new to this, and could use all the advice I can get! Here’s the pictures… 

What you want to do next time I think (if anything at all as it's hardly noticeable) is trim the edges of your cake so that you can ice to the edges of your cake board, this will give you a nice even covering of icing as you are starting with an even distance between the cake and edge of the board.

It looks to me like one of the cakes may be a bit close to the edge of your board so in trying to ice it evenly it's pushing you out a little (see the first photo, bottom right there is a difference in the distance between the cake and board as you look up the cake and again on the top left.

Honestly though once you ice and decorate that cake it will be even less noticeable and I can't see any reason that it will be structurally compromised.

Also a smooth turntable (no baking paper) and a scraper will make it much easier for you to get even, smooth icing than a spatula and baking paper on the turn table and you just hold the scraper in place and turn the table to get a nice even finish (After you use the spatula to apply the icing of course :-) )

I use a glass lazy susan that I got frim Myers and a metal scraper my hubby made me for mine and it makes life so easy :-) 

Do you you have dowels in your cake? I would insert  five. 2 dowels in the back, 2 dowels in the front, one large dowel in the middle. Dowels put in from the top of cake to the bottom, right to the cake board. I would put the dowels in now before your final buttercream or fondant covering. This is essential so your cake won’t lean/slide. Important irregardless whether you are transporting your cake. 

@jchuck - do you mean you dowel a single tier cake?

 No bubs1st birthday

I don’t usually dowel a one tier cake. Kelbel2440 stacked 5 layers to get the height of this cake. Of course, not sure how big each layer is, she didn’t state that. And you can’t tell from the picture. I definitely start inserting dowels from a two tier stacked cake and up. 

For the life of me, I cannot see a bit of lean to the cake!  It lines up perfectly with the bricks in the background.  That being said, if you are uncomfortable, I would dowel it, as recommended by jchuck.

Depending upon the cake structure, I often dowel single tier cakes, like carrot cake, Hummingbird cake and other fragile recipes.  

Yes Sandra, I always say better to safe then sorry!!

Thank you for all of the sound advice!  The stability of the cake did great!  I did end up putting skewers in, but I dont even think I would have needed them, as after it was frosted it was solid!  (I'm still amazed how solid and heavy these cakes get!  Time to start doing push ups!!!)  The cake turned out beautiful, but as you may have seen in my other post - the decorations fell off.  Live and learn though, next one will be that much better!

I looked wonderful, Kelbel2440, and only a few of the decorations fell off, so it still looked good!