|
Wedding cakes tend to be stacked (with each layer resting on the one below) or separated (with tiers supported by columns or pillars). Without the proper support, you risk having your cake collapse or looking at layers slide apart.
Whether tiered or stacked, you need a few supplies to provide support for your vertical creation.
- Dowels: To provide support for each tier, you snip these 1/4-inch round wooden poles to the height of the cake layer and stick them into the center of the cake. Some cake decorators use heavy-duty hollow plastic dowel rods; carefully cut these with a sharp knife. Wooden dowels are stronger and more reliable.
- Cardboard rounds: You place your finished tiers on cardboard rounds. The cardboard gives the tier a solid surface to rest on the dowels below, and the rounds aid in removing the tiers for cutting and serving.
- Presentation board: This board, usually made of plywood or Masonite, holds your finished tiered cake. It's bigger than the cake — both to make for a better presentation and to allow for proper transportation. The presentation board often is covered with cake foil lining or a similar grease-resistant but decorative wrapping. Another option for covering is spreading royal icing over the board so that, when dried overnight, the board has a smooth, pearly surface.
- Separator set: If you intend to separate cake tiers rather than stack them, you need a separator set that contains separator plates, which the tiers rest on, and columns or pillars that snap into each plate from the tier below.
Inserting dowels into your cake tiers is much less daunting than it sounds. To begin, you need cake layers (duh!), dowels (which you can get at a hardware store or craft store), garden pruning shears, a rubber mallet, a pencil, a bamboo skewer, and the empty cake pans from the cake layers you baked.
 | If you plan to do quite a bit of cake baking and decorating, keep a set of supplies devoted exclusively to cake-related tasks. For instance, label a brand-new pair of pruning shears with "Cake" in a permanent marker so that you don't use the same pair to cut roses and prune shrubs. |
To insert dowels in cake layers, follow these steps:
1. Rest the pan from your second largest tier in the center of your largest tier, and press gently to make a very light impression in the cake.
2. In the center of the impression made in Step 1, use a bamboo skewer to mark evenly spaced holes in a circle around the center of the tier in which you'll insert dowels.
As a general rule, plan on resting an 8- or 9-inch round layer on five dowels and a 6-inch layer on four dowels. You have to strike a delicate balance: You don't want to pepper your layers with too many dowels, but you want each layer to have enough support.
3. Insert a dowel in one of the holes, and press it all the way down until you hit the cardboard round. With a pencil, mark the height of the tier on the dowel.
4. Remove the dowel from the cake and use the pruning shears to cut it to the appropriate height. Reinsert the dowel into the cake.
5. Repeat Steps 3 and 4 with the other dowels for that tier.
6. Repeat Steps 1 through 5 for each additional tier except the top tier, which doesn't need multiple dowels because it doesn't bear any weight.
7. Measure one dowel to the height of your entire cake. Sharpen one end of the dowel to a point with a pencil sharpener. Insert the dowel in the center of the top tier, and stake it all the way through the center of the cake.
When you encounter the cardboard round at the base of each tier, use a rubber mallet to pound gently on the dowel and pierce through the cardboard to the next layer.
| 
