I am making a saxaphone cake for 8/26. It has ALOT of parts. I’m going to make those ahead with Salome gumpaste.  My problem is that I don’t know about lengths and placement. What can I use to make a replica of the cake itself so I can get the parts the right size?  I thought about making the cake without frosting it, etc, and then making the parts based on cake size, and freezing it. However, I don’t  particularly care for freezing cakes. Anybody have a suggestion other than above that I could use to get a basic shape I can work with?  Thanks!

ok so this cake is a sculpture of a saxophone -- it's not an edible saxophone on top of a cake right? standing up or laying down sax?

why don't you like to freeze cake? pastry chefs use freezers, it's a tremendous tool! especially for carving! 

so many tributaries to this -- do you used butter in your cake batter?

how many servings do you need?

find a good picture of a saxophone and copy it -- exactly what you want yours to look like --

measure the sax in the copy and finagle the copier to increase the size to how big you want your sax sculpture -- copy all the portions of it in pages so you get the whole thing in the correct dimensions in several pages or however big you want it -- then tape it all together cover the whole picture with tape cut it out -- voila -- your pattern!

tbc

or -- what I started doing is tracing over the computer screen -- using that for my pattern --

say your finished product needs to be 18" tall -- you find a picture that is six inches tall -- increase it by 200% to get it 18" -- right, reggie? or would it be a 300% increase on the copy machine? I think it's 200% but reggie is great with math & science --

you just gotta get the dimensions and multiply to get it all in proper proportion --

anyhow is any of this coming across?

Makes perfect sense.  Thanks!  

 hope it goes well!!