Welcome to the Cake Decorators Q&A

To help me build popcorn folio my thoughts are to do some designs on cake dummies and photograph.  Can I reuse the dummies easily ? As at present I do not need them for display just for photograph ?

Thank you :))

Hi cake day dreamer,

I reuse dummies all the time.  The better the quality of polystyrene, the easier the icing comes off.  If the icing is still quite soft it can be peeled away, although you must be careful not to damage the dummy.

If you’re having trouble getting old icing off, pop your dummy in the freezer for a while.  You will normally find the icing chips off easily.  If all else fails, running it under warm water will help to dissolve the sugar, it’s a bit messy and can take a bit of time if the icing has been on a while but it definitely works.

Hope that helps!

JC x

Perfect, thank you very much JC 🙂 x

I reuse mine as well. I just damped them with water for the icing to stick on which helps it come off more easily. I used royal icing once an had to bin the full thing I couldn’t get it off again lol.

I thought you could soak the dummy in water to remove royal icing so I googled it (there’s a change, lol) and you can.  See

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Z2gy-JXou3wC&pg=PA15&dq=soak+cake+dummies+to+remove+royal+icing&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NQrRT-nYHY-T0QWy1sE8&ved=0CFAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=soak%20cake%20dummies%20to%20remove%20royal%20icing&f=false

A long time ago I used to use a wooden dummy for practicing icing.