Mosaic Cake - Is my timeline okay and other newbie questions

I'm making a 2 tiered mosaic cake (6" and 9" - white cake w/ BC and modeling choc) for my friend's birthday next Saturday. Also, I have a 1 year old daughter and can only work on this at night after she goes to bed. The following is my game plan and a few questions. This is my first large decorated cake, so please let me know if you see any blaring mistakes!

Sunday night: sketch my design and create printed templates (I'm a graphic designer so hopefully this won't be too difficult)

Monday - Wednesday nights: dye the pre-made fondarific modeling chocolate with gel dyes, roll it out, cut it and lay out the design on wax paper over my templates

Questions: Do I need to store the shaped chocolate in airtight containers in the fridge? Should I put shortening or something on the wax paper so it will stick?

Thursday night: bake cakes (2 - 9" rounds and 2 - 6" rounds) FYI, I'm using FS's Better Vanilla Cake recipe which sounds pretty foolproof…fingers crossed.

Questions: I've heard it's good to let cakes cool in their pans and then store them in their pans in the fridge. True?

Friday night: shape, frost and decorate cake…long night ;-)

Questions: Should I put simple syrup on both sides of each layer? Should I decorate each layer before putting the cake together with dowels? Will I be able to lay the wax paper with the chocolate directly onto the BC without everything falling off? I'm using Brite White Icing (no butter), so do I still refrigerate the finished cake?

Hopefully this will work out!

Best,

Sara

Thank you! I'm getting so nervous waiting to start and since my husband's only day off is tomorrow, I think I'll do what you suggested and go ahead and bake everything now and freeze it. Should I make decorating a 2 night project and defrost them on the counter on Thursday?

I didn't do a trial run, but I made cupcakes with some of the batter and they came out great! I'm also freezing some of the cupcakes so I can see what they're like when they defrost, etc.

The one issue I ran into was that my layers did not come out very thick, so I won't be able to torte them. No worries. I'm making extra layers tonight. Thanks so much for the freezing suggestion! Getting these cakes baked in advance is saving me a lot of stress.
 

So I've made the layers and they're in the freezer and I've started making the modeling chocolate decorations. It's incredibly time consuming!

My question is about the cake. My plan is to take the layers out of the freezer tonight (Thursday) and trim, fill and crumb coat them. Do I need to refrigerate the cake once it's been crumb coated? I'm using Brite White BC which is supposed to be shelf stable for 6 months and the cake seems pretty sturdy. I'm afraid that refrigeration will make the BC so crusty that I won't be able to decorate it Friday night. Anyone know if leaving it out for 2 days (til party on Sat night) is okay?

I'm also a little confused about when to stack the 2 tiers. If I wait until they're both fully decorated, won't I mess up the top tier when I put it on the first tier?

As a side note, I am in awe of what you all do to create these amazing cakes. It is TOUGH WORK!

This was my first decorated, tiered cake, and it was by far the most difficult baking job I've ever done! I don't know how you all do this on a regular basis. WOW, WHAT A LOT OF WORK! In the end I spent over 15 hours on this (though my husband says with research, ordering and planning it was more like 40hrs) and I had to scramble to finish, but it got done and it tasted GREAT and everyone LOVED IT! YAY!

The finished cake looked NOTHING like what I had designed. In fact most of the mosaic was left off because I ran out of time. If I had an extra several hours (and a babysitter) I could have done a lot more.

Here are a couple of pics:

danetteb, thank you sooooo much for your suggestions. They were a life saver! I've learned so much in making this that I'm actually excited to make another one