State of the Cake Address

Hello my fellow blog readers.
Tonight we have a report on the progress of my wedding cake journey.
I have begun practicing my hand at smoothing frosting and piping Swiss Buttercream (SBC). I have learned a few things so far.
#1. 2 layers of 8 inch rice krispies are not tall enough. We're gonna need 3 or maybe 4 layers.
#2. To get the rice krispie treats out of the pan, do not try to stick a knife down the side and pry it out. It will only deform the shape. Just hold the pan upside down and shake shake shake whilst pounding the bottom a little and it will fall out cleanly if the pan has been previously greased.
#3. My 8 inch cake pans do not have straight sides! So it was hard to get the frosting really smooth with the bench scraper since it would scrape away only the middle of the cake and not get the top or bottom.
#4. The lacey details is harder than it looks!
I tried to totally free hand it the first time. No bueno:

For the second try I used a different approach. I scraped off all the white frosting, and a little beige, to reuse it, and turned all the extra frosting beige. Oh well. Then I drew out my plan for the details and taped wax paper over the top of the design. I tried 3 different tips and finally found that number 3 works best for me. I piped out the frosting onto the wax paper following my design. This worked pretty great. It's easier to pipe it out on a flat surface than on the side of the cake. However, transferring it to the cake was kind of ridiculous.
#5 If you want to transfer a SBC design onto a SBC frosted cake, the best way is to have the cake really cold and the frosting design still room temperature. Then put the whole cake in the fridge for 10 minutes while the design hardens, and THEN lightly tap the design and pull the paper off. It took lots of trial and error with temperatures to find this out, and I still wasn't happy with the outcome:

So lastly, I tried the approach of putting the paper with the design on top of the frosting and poking little holes through the design into the frosting to give myself a marker for where to pipe.
#6 Don't press hard on the paper or you get finger smudges in the frosting, even through the paper.
#7 SBC pipes better than the traditional Wilton frosting recipe:

I need more practice piping onto the side of the cake. That angle is really hard! So, don't judge yet. I'm still practicing!
But with all that I have learned from these trials cakes, I hope that the Shower Cake this Monday will be pretty cute! A taller base cake with flat sides should be smoother and lace details becoming increasingly uniform and smooth. That's the goal.
Thank you. God bless you.