Display Cakes Week 7

Display Cakes Week 7: Two-tiered mini-wedding cakes

We learned about dowelling this week. The dowels are inserted in the bottom tier of the cake, to provide support for the upper tier, so the bottom one won't take the full weight of the upper ones (i.e. won't get crushed under their weight. I've seen it happen. It's sad).
Dowelling involves cutting the dowels into several pieces to a certain length. The dowels should be just below the fondant, so the top tier will sit snugly on the bottom. Otherwise the top tier will look like it's "hovering".

Chef Instructor cutting the dowels with a serrated edge knife. He warned us to be really careful when cutting them; years ago, he cut himself while cutting the dowels at a pastry shop he worked at. The blade went halfway through his index finger and his thumb. After he got it sewed up at the ER, he went back to work and finished his shift. What a trooper.
After stacking and crumb-coating both the 6" and the 8" rounds, I dowelled the 8". It poked through ever so slightly above the buttercream. Meh. It should still be OK. I put the cake in the fridge to let it set overnight. Until the end of class, all of us made gum paste decorations. I wanted mine to be sakura (i.e. Japanese cherry blossoms) themed, so I cut out a bunch of cherry blossoms, and left them out to dry.

The next day, I carefully eased the 6" cake onto the 8"...and it seemed to "hover" a little. But I used the gum paste flowers I made yesterday to hide the gap.
Chef required us to put fondant drapes on the cakes. I used fondants in three different shades of pink and rolled them out to create the tie-dye look. The drape itself turned out very pretty. But when I tried to drape it on, the edges started cracking :( To top it off, the drape nearly slid off the cake completely. I held it down until the fondant got hard enough to hold its shape. The buttercream frosting got messed up a bit, but it looked OK otherwise.
I finished decorating with the rest of the flowers.

The top view

In all its glory. I'm happy with the way the drape turned out. I'll be using this tie-dye technique every now and then.

Epilogue
...But of course, we had to get rid of our cakes from the previous week, the fondant groom's cake.

(Cue the Final Fantasy Battle music) It's my chef's knife against his. Who will win the battle???

Well, this was certainly a rare opportunity to slaughter this hard-to-defeat enemy character. And he was indeed, formidable, even in cake form. The fondant covering had hardened into a surprisingly tough armor--my first swing with the chef's knife left a only a shallow cut, so I had to stab it repeatedly.