Hoping someone with some experience using dummy tiers can shed some light for me...

I'm meeting with a couple this Saturday, who are asking for a seven tiered wedding cake. They want to incorporate dummies to reach that number and when I asked why, the bride said it's because her fiance wants it to represent the seven years they've been together. They have between 200-250 guests they want to serve, so I figure an 18/14/10/6 for 248 srvgs, and 16, 12 and 8 dummies in between the real cake tiers to make seven. Does that sound like it will work? Or is this a recipe for disaster? (I'd actually rather do seven tiers of REAL cake!)

How the heck do I drive the dowel through the center of seven tiers, three of which are not cake? Would pcs of foam break off and mingle with the cake? Is this the type of thing where I'd have to create a doweled structure ahead of time and by cutting holes in each of the tiers, slide them down the dowel to set them up?

Also can someone please double check this for me? I'm calculating the price using a 75% price for dummies based on the number of servings they'd provide if they were real. So I'm coming up with a dummy total of 180 servings @ $2.60/srvg = $468. That's in addition to the price for the real cake which is $830.80.

I have a feeling that the novelty of this romantic seven year notion may wear off quickly once they see the price. It may even make them wish they'd done this after only 3 or 4 years of being together!

Thanks for any help you can offer!

If you'd rather do all real cake, price the dummy tiers the same as the real tiers.

I did a six-tiered cake that had two fake tiers, and I charged close to $2000 for it. It had a ton of gumpaste on it, but still...I think that price is a little low!

On a practical side, I'd figure out a way that the middle section of the cake was real, and the top and the bottom were the fake tiers. That way you could use the dummy on the bottom as the base and just stick the real tiers on that, stack the real tiers as usual, then put the top fake ones on that. I don't know what combinations of tier sizes would add up for that, but I bet you could figure something out.

There's no need to put a dowel through the center of the cake at all if you set it up on site, I never use a center dowel on anything even if it's something that I'm transporting assembled.

Thank you both for your responses. I've had only two couples request dummy tiers, and they both ended up just going with real cake once they thought about beautifully decorated styro tiers lying in the trash bin. As one groom said,"It's like seeing my cash sit in the trash barrel". We'll see what this consult brings on Saturday.

Hmmm..costumeczar, that's an interesting way to think about it. I'm going to go back to the drawing board and see what sizes may work to do it that way.