Beautiful tiered birthday cake

So it was my sister's 25th birthday. I wanted to make the cake from Sleeping Beauty, except not blue. I'd never tried to make a tiered cake before, but my saviour was the Cake and Icing Centre at Samford. They sold me the three sizes of tins, the boards, dowels, and icing flowers and leaves I needed. They also gave me very clear instructions and helpful tips.
I baked three cakes the day before the party. The smallest cake was vanilla pound cake (butter cake is a bit feeble) and the other two were lemon pound. All three had strawberry jam filling. Then I wrapped them in foil when they were cold. The next morning I started to assemble and decorate the cake.

You use boards and dowels to support the weight of each layer on the one below it. It did involve a fair bit of measuring and cutting and slicing, and even then my layers weren't perfectly level, but it seemed to work OK. The Cake Centre sells base boards and layer boards that are already the correct size for each tin.

Once it was assembled, I covered the whole thing in pink buttercream icing and used a hot knife to smooth it out. I made small white balls from packet fondant icing rolled in icing sugar and used them to circle each layer. Then the icing flowers and leaves filled in the gaps and went on the top. Not a bad effort for my first time... next time I will try a smooth fondant finish instead of buttercream.