Welcome to the Cake Decorators Q&A

Hello all,

I have 2 questions!

I am making a 4 tier wedding cake.  The bride has requested a 14inch bottom tier fruit cake.  She then wants 2 dummy tiers.  She also  wants her own fruit cake as the top tier.  My first question is, will a 5inch fruit cake be able to sit on an 8inch and 11inch dummy, and a 14 inch fruit cake?  Or, would it be best to make a separate fruit cake.

Secondly, does anyone have any tips for flawless fondant and marzipan coverage for a large 14 inch fruit cake?

Thanks for your help in advance!

Hi Sunbird

I might be a bit slow catching on here, so before I can have a go at answering your question, am I right in understanding that there are to be just two real cakes? The  two dummy cakes are the middle tiers and then the small cake on the very top? If that is the case then yes, there is no reason why the 5 inch cake can’t sit on the very top.

For your second question, use white marzipan if you can, it is better quality and doesn’t have yellow artificial colour added. For the fondant, that really is personal choice and what your budget is. There are many different fondants available, I now use Satin Ice, Paul uses Renshaw’s Regal Ice but he has recently advocated Fondarific in one of the blogs. If you have a look in the free/beginners library, Paul talks about the different fondants available and where to source them from.

I think to get a flawless cover you need to prepare your cake surface as well as you can,  roll out the fondant as quickly as possible so it doesn’t have time to start drying and cracking. That’s going to be a huge size of fondant, so an extra long rolling pin (or the MAT if you have one) would be useful. I have the Mat but can’t roll out using the top sheet, I just roll out on the bottom sheet and use that to lift the fondant into place. There are several answers on the Mat in Q&A which might be useful to you, just put ‘The Mat’ in the search box and they should came up for you. Hope some of this helps, please come back if I haven’t got it quite right. Cheers. ps In one of the tutorials Paul shows how to cover styro foam cakes in accordance with food safety and hygiene. miwl

Thank you so much everyone for your help.  I have now figured out that for every 100g of ivory fondant, I need 15g teddy bear brown to achieve the pale coffee colour I need.  Saves a lot of mess and stickiness with the colourings!  Thanks to MIWL, as I have now bought myself the mat by sweetwise and I think this will really help to cover such a large cake!

Thanks again for all of your incredibly helpful comments. What a fantastic resource!