Making a Vintage Tiered Cake Server

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Making a Vintage Tiered Cake Server

July 12, 2021

I have to say this is my favorite DIY to date! When my sister and I settled on a date for our bridal tea for a special young woman whom we had known for many years, I decided I had to make vintage china cake servers that I had seen on an HGTV reality series called, "Escape to the Chateau."

First, I went on a hunt for beautiful vintage china. I was envisioning pastels, including pink, and I happened to find three that looked good together and two more that could be put together at an antique store in Dallas. The other three I found at an antique store in Kansas City. Funny how they came together in sets as if they were waiting for me to make them into a tiered server!

To begin, here is everything you need to make a tiered server:

Plates

Masking tape or painter's tape

Glass & Tile diamond bits for a drill

Drill

Rods and handles for server (Etsy.com)

Compass

Ruler or measuring tape

Place tape on the back of the plate to absorb the shock of drilling the hole.

Next, using a compass, make marks in the middle of the plate using the same distance on the compass, from several sides of the inner circle of the plate.

Write a big dot on the place where all the lines intersect from the compass.

Next, the tedious part! Put your diamond bit on your drill, and drill a hole through the dot, which should be right in the middle of the back of the plate. Drilling this hole takes a bit longer than I expected. You want to apply pressure, but not too much. We even did a practice round on a plate that I didn't care if it got cracked, but none of the plates cracked. My hubby was the lead man on this, and he held the drill upright so that there was no angle on the drilling. After 8 plates, he deserved a gold medal!

Put the bolt and heaviest washer that came with the server rods and handle through the hole of the plate that goes on the bottom of the server.

Next, the fun part! Screw on the rods that keep the plates together.

Add the second rod if you are doing three tiers.

This is the finished product! So rewarding to have a beautiful piece to use at our bridal tea!

And here is the bridal tea! So fun to use these - actually the day after we made them!

Little petit fours and macaroons were the perfect sweet small bites to place on this server.

And weren't you dying to see the bride? This is the bride-to-be who is as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. What fun we had that day, and we were pleased to have the tiered servers to celebrate her special time.