My first tiered cake

I've been dreaming to do tiered or stacked cake for quite some times. Last weekend, I finally managed to pull myself together and finally constructed a tiered cake. My 1st tiered cake to be exact. Original plan was to do a stacked cake, with buttercream decorations.

I baked 2 chocolate cakes (8" and 6") and filled it with cookies and cream. Made Italian Meringue Buttercream (IMBC) earlier that week, but I must have overwhipped the egg-whites. My buttercream felt so soft and cottony, and lumpy when it's cold - not suitable for spreading. Tried to repair the damage but not able to do so. So, to the dustbin it went.

I'm too lazy to work on the sugar syrup to make another batch of IMBC (since I don't have any sugar thermometer, and if the sugar syrup is left too long, it will start to caramelized, and the buttercream will be more yellow that what it was supposed to be) and was thinking to just work on buttercream with no egg whites in it. But the buttercream recipe that contain no egg whites that I've tried before was way too sweet. Wanted to try a different buttercream recipe, but unsure whether it will be overly sweet as well. So, I decided to make chocolate ganache instead to cover the cakes and then try the new buttercream recipe for decoration purpose.

The chocolate cake turns out moist, the cookies and cream filling was delicious, chocolate ganache - yummy, and to my surprise, the buttercream icing was not that sweet.

So, here's the upper tier = covered with chocolate ganache, decorated with buttercream roses, and side decorations using white chocolate.

And here's the bottom tier = covered with chocolate ganache, and decorated with small flowers (design inspired by Yatt from Yatt's Lilkitchen).

And here's my 1st ever tiered cake (using pillars):

For my beloved husband, Happy Birthday Sayang!!