I'm making my niece's 16th birthday cake and wonder if I've messed up (not an unusual occurrence BTW). It's a chocolate cake filled with vanilla SMBC, covered with milk chocolate ganache and then fondant. I'm piping a henna design with royal icing and adding some flowers made with modeling chocolate. I'm in Texas...it's been ridiculously hot...and the cake has to be transported this afternoon about an hour away. I made an icing using shortening, but my family hated it so I went back to SMBC. I'm afraid if I refrigerate the cake after decorating, the royal icing will run. But then I'm afraid if I don't, the SMBC will get too soft. I should have thought this through better. Sorry for the long post...too many variables. Any advice would be appreciated.

If you have enough space in your fridge, I have a suggestion. You can box up your cake and wrap it airtight in a couple of layers of plastic wrap. Then when you take it out, make sure all the condensation has passed off the box and the cake is at room temp before you unwrap it and take it out of the box. That way, the condensation runs down the side of the box and not down the side of the cake. Hope there's AC at the venue! I'm originally from Texas but now I live in Cancún - talk about going from the frying pan into the fire - but I always use ganache under my fondant because it holds up so much better in the heat. I've been working up the nerve to try SMBC, so please let me know how this goes.

Marianna: When I took the cake out of the refrigerator to pipe the design, within 15 minutes it was very wet. I had to put the cake under a fan and it took two hours for the fondant to dry completely. By then, I had just enough time to pipe the design and get to the party. I just left it out of the refrigerator. I like your idea and will try it in the future. It just seems I always keep adding stuff and redoing stuff until I'm in a time crunch. But the good news is my niece loved the cake. I don't know how the SMBC held up because they wouldn't cut the cake...they only ate the cupcakes I had made to accompany it (another last minute thing since I found out more people were going to be there).

Oh, boy, I know about both the redoing and the time crunch business! You're very lucky if your fondant dried in two hours. I can't get mine to dry even from one day to the next and even with a fan. I thought Texas was humid, but it has nothing on living less than a mile from the Caribbean coast! So have you posted a photo yet? I'm dying to see it. If they didn't even want to cut it, it must have been spectacular.

I posted the picture. I'll try to post the link.

http://cakecentral.com/gallery/2101465


God bless my family for only seeing the love that went into it and not EVERY. SINGLE. FLAW. that I see. I always want to try new things and new recipes since, due to our waistlines, I don't make very many cakes anymore. Bites me in the bottom quite often. Guess I should only try new things on practice or dummy cakes. Thanks Marianna for your suggestions/encouragement.

That's a really lovely cake, Vicki. I'm torn between the cake and dummy thing, too. I'm making lots of cakes because I'm trying out new recipes (the people in my daughters' offices just LOVE me, because that's where I send most of them). But I'm trying to build a wedding cake portfolio and I just found a place near me that sells sheets of styrofoam any thickness you want and who will cut dummies to size, so I hope to be doing a lot more of those, too.