Assembling tiered wedding cake

Gina2411

Hi
Can someone please help? I have made a two tiered (Delia Smith) rich fruit wedding cake. Do I really need to put dowels in to support the top tier or is that just for sponge cakes? The bottom tier is 11 inches wide and the top is 8 inches wide. I can't imagine that the top tier would sink into the bottom.

Help.

Gina

paddingtondoo

The top tier will be fairly heavy.

Maybe it's better to be safe than sorry and dowel it.
That way you should prevent any potential disasters and it will make it more stable.

If you are using pillars it will definitely need dowelling as all the weight will be resting on the bottoms of the pillars.

unhappybuuny79

From my own experience, i would use dowels on your cake.

It makes it much more stable in situe as well as stops it from sinking, if the enviroment it is in it will drop slightly. if using pillars then dowels are deffinately needed as these give the cake stability.

HTH

honeypop

It might not sink right into it, but if the bottom tier is iced on top, the top tier will crush through this and it will come away when the top tier is lifted off so the whole cake can be cut up, a bit unsightly!

Best to go for dowels rather than be sorry.

amandada

It depends on what kind of icing you've used on your bottom tier.
If you've used fondant, then you'll definitely need dowels, but if you've royal iced it, you shouldn't need them.

(and that recipe has to be the BEST!)

tubbee2

M&S columns for fruit cakes have dowels that fit through the columns so they are hidden from sight and provide good support - but, rather bizarrely the dowels have to be cut to an appropriate length instead of coming ready sized! (I couldn't understand why the underside of the cake board didn't have holes in for the dowels but came to the conclusion I wasn't well up on cake - except in the eating of it)