How does a baker assemble a multitiered wedding cake so the weight of the upper layers doesn’t flatten the lower ones? (At a cousin’s wedding in 1996, they even had a wedding cake in several flavors as well as layers!)
IIRC, they have plastic supports that the cake sits on. There is actually a piece of cardboard under the top layer and on down, supported by plastic sticks.
At least this is how it was in my wedding cake.
Usually they put a layer of cardboard under the icing of lower levels of cake - this provides the necessary support for the upper layers.
OR
Sometimes wedding cakes are fruit cakes, which are pretty much hard as a rock anyhow.
I actually watched an episode of Martha Stuart’s Food Channel show on this very subject. Pretty much like BunnyGirl’s cake, only the baker used wooden dowels and styrofoam instead of plastic sticks and cardboard.
One method of support for cakes with at least three tiers is a manufactured support made of plastic. Say a cake has 12, 9, and 6 inch layers. Once the 12" layer is put in placed on the serving platter and iced a 9" plastic disk with four thin spikes is set in the center of the 12" layer. The spikes pass through the lower layer to the serving platter and support the middle tier. This is also done with the next tier up, except that the spikes of the disk that support the 6" tier will of course rest on the 9" disk below it. When a tier is to be seperated from the one below it by those decorative pillars the pillars are attached to a similar disk that gets iced over.
As a baker I like the wedding “cake” I made recently for a high dollar reception that my boss was catering. It’s a French item called a croquembouche. It’s made from little cream puffs that are dipped in a sugar syrup that has been cooked to the crack stage. The puffs are piled in a tall, narrow pyramid and pulled off with tongs. Kind of trendy just now I’ve heard. Martha Stewart(ugh) features it in one of her books but judging from the directions and her recipe it looks like it was “borrowed” from Julia Childs.
My wedding cake was in three square tiers. Each tier was covered with a sheet of marzipan (~3/8" thick) before the next tier was placed on top. No supports were needed, it help up beautifully, despite the 80 degree weather.
Of course, it was a fairly dense flourless chocolate cake, so maybe that helped.
Well, they don’t put a heavy layer of carrot cake on top of light yellow cake without real supports. (Mine landed on a guest 10 minutes into the reception - Get a professional baker, not a friend of the mom-in-law to do it!)