Faux tiers

What is a faux tier?

Faux tiers are made up of polystyrene and are used as a cake replacement. Generally used in cake designs to make the cake look larger without having all those portions made up of real cake. Mostly used for fondant/hard iced finish.

There has always been a general misconception that faux tiers mean a lower cost for a big looking cake, but often this doesn’t really work out much cheaper if the cake requires a large amount of decorative application. Polystyrene is harder to cover, requires extra attention for stability/stacking in some designs, and as most cake people I know would say, just plain annoying to work with. But most important of all this product has a huge impact on our environment.

People in our industry will know, its a wasteful one. The single use packaging is phenomenal. The bottles the colours come in, the bags our stock arrives in. Even just the packing plastic used to keep our stock safe in transit. Kitchen wipes, piping bags, the list goes on. It is something that has been getting under my skin so much, and with the recent events here in Australia I cant help but feel im playing a huge part in ruining this beautiful planet of ours. After seeing loads of my fellow industry florists change the way they work, removing floral foam from their displays, I knew I had to remove the faux tiers from ours.

From now on I will no longer be offering Faux tiers. We started trialling this last year and I have had mixed reactions. Some people have been very accepting of this choice and others of course, have not. But I know that this is something that I have to do this. I want to try my hardest to make sure I’m doing what I can to help preserve what we have left of this planet, for the world my daughter is growing up in.

For all clients who have already booked cakes with us with poly tiers, I will still honour these orders, but its never too late to change if you want to!

We have display cakes in our office that are foam. We let the icing set hard then we painstakingly smash off the hard icing and reuse those foam tiers for more display cakes. Making sure to avoid throwing out that product. I have these to provide examples of sizing to my customers during a consultation. These get reused and reused and stored in a box for each consult. In time I hope to find another option for this aswell. Unfortunately there is no other product for us to use for this currently. But if we dont look for new options, there will never be any.

I understand that a big grand cake, is sometimes what everyone dreams of for their wedding day, but for the sake of your future children, would you enjoy your wedding any less if your cake was smaller and/or real?

We have a few more plans to make our business more efficient with our products and waste and I look forward to sharing these changes with you too!

I also challenge my fellow cake community…. #nofoamtiers