A stacked cake is not cake resting on cake. Each tier sits on its own board, and that board rests on dowels — bubble tea straws, plastic dowels or wooden dowels — pushed into the tier below and cut dead level with its surface. The cake around the dowels carries nothing; the dowels carry everything. Done properly, the bottom tier could be mousse and the stack would still stand, because the load runs down the supports, board to board, all the way to the drum.

The studio works to a fixed counting rule — every build gets its number from the tier above it, never a guess — and the calculator on this page applies it to your exact tiers: one even ring, always inside the footprint of the tier it carries, in the support the studio would actually reach for. What never changes: every dowel must be cut to exactly the same height. One proud dowel tilts the board, and a tilted board is how a tier starts walking sideways on the drive.

The counts and supports above are half the job — the other half is technique: the order of operations, how the set gets cut identical, and the level check that catches a proud dowel before it tilts a tier.

Every stacked cake gets a central dowel and lives on a proper drum — those two rules are not optional. The exact board weights, drum sizing and the prep that makes the central dowel go in cleanly are part of the studio’s system.

Cakes travel cold, flat and slow. Chilled buttercream is rigid armour; at room temperature it is soft furniture. The cake rides on a level surface — the footwell or flat trunk floor on a non-slip mat, never a seat, never a lap — in a pre-cooled car with the AC working. Warm day, no AC? Don’t drive it stacked. And when a cold cake meets warm venue air it will bead with condensation: normal, harmless, and it evaporates on its own as long as nobody touches it.