Hello Cake Central Community! I am a fairly new cake decorator and have been asked to make this wedding cake (which will only be my second wedding cake ever  ) The customer said she needed to feed 150-200 people, so with such a wide gap there, I just decided to charge her for the 200 servings to be on the safe side...I have never alternated multiple round and square tiers and am very nervous about this. The customer did say it was okay to start with square tier on bottom if needed ( I thought after playing around with some cake pans that might be easier?) I don't have all the cake pans needed for the cake, so I may have to beg borrow and steal (ok, buy) to make this order. I am having trouble with what sizes layers i need to use in order to get the amount of servings needed...or do I need to just make the cake and have a sheet cake to serve in order to get all the servings? I am using satin ribbon instead of fondant and once I figure out the size of tiers to use, I need to figure out how to calculate the amount of ribbon needed to go around the tiers...Any advice on attaching the ribbon or how I should place the artificial flowers would be greatly appreciated!  

AHey, this site should help with your servings/sizes.

http://shinymetalobjects.net/cake/calculator/cakulator.cgi

thank  you Stephanie3. Do you or any of the other readers have any ideas on the inch differences between tiers for alternating the round and square layers? that part doesn't seem as straight forward to me...when playing around with the cake pans, I found that 12, 10, 6, and 4 inch stacked nicely, that was starting with square tier on bottom, but those sizes wont yield 200 servings.This is using 2 inch pans...should I do triple layers?

Okay, feeling silly...I should have done a bit more searching before I created this thread. I found a similar thread posted earlier with some helpful tips...even found a chart, which I am posting here for any that might be needing this info as well...could still use help on how to calculate the amount of ribbon I need ;) I have decided starting from the bottom with 14' square, 12' round, 8' square, topped off with a 6' round...that should yield 204 servings! perfect!

SQR....RND....Fits on:
4.........5.66.......6"
6.........8.49.......9"
8........11.31.....12"
10......14.14.....16"
12......16.97.....18"
14......19.80.....20" (barely -- 22 safer)
16......22.63.....24"
18......25.46.....26" (barely -- 28 safer -- golly that's a big round!) (posted by doug)

Measure around each pan to calculate ribbon and add extra for tails.

Have a look at the "cake sketcher" on http://www.bakingit.com. This will sketch out the cake so you can see what looks best and there are lots of other tools on the site that might help.