Last night a customer came to the ice cream shop I work at wanting a two tiered unicorn cake for Saturday. I said we couldn't do it, one because we don't have boxes to accommodate tiered cakes and, two, because we don't have any supplies to create a support structure. And even if we did, I wasn't sure it would be possible to make the cake stable, because in my mind, as soon as the ice cream starts to soften, either on the drive home from the store or when they put the cake out, any supports I put in the cake could start to shift, making the whole thing unstable and liable to collapse. They ended up ordering two separate cakes. I suspect they're going to try stacking them at home, even though I said we don't have anything to use for support in the bottom tier. But I figure if they want to be stubborn, what they do with the cake once it's out of my hands isn't really any of my business.

Anyway, it got me wondering if it's even possible to make a stable tiered ice cream cake. Have any of you guys tried it? If you have, what kind of supports did you use? Our ice cream cakes are half actual cake and half ice cream. It did occur to me that the cake layers might give the supports a little more stability so they wouldn't shift too much as the ice cream softened. But the top layer of ice cream might still cave under the weight and lead to collapse? It definitely isn't something I'd be comfortable promising to a customer, but after they left, I thought I'd come here and see if any of you wonderfully talented people have tried something like this and might be able to satisfy my curiosity about whether there's anything someone more creative and savvy than I might be able to do to make a request like this possible.

while i’ve never made a tiered one — if you layer the ice cream between cake layers like an Oreo cookie, because it is fully frozen it would work fine — but of course it has a brief display time — and if the cakes are stacked one directly on top the other the centers would melt last so it is definitely possible but high maintenance delivery, storage and display —

good call on passing on the order 

but if it is not fully frozen big time solid it would be a disaster — and most home fridge freezers could not handle the job