Your cake is gorgeous!! I agree that the wilton large wide plastic dowels are the way to go.My feeling is the cake was just too heavy therefore the bottom tier couldn't support the top two.In hindsight I probably would have delivered the cake with the top tier off and assembled it there at the party.Again someone mentioned "How do you know what the driver drives like"...Good Question...You'll never know!!! I also think a mousse filling may have helped in the dimise.I just don't trust their stability.Lots of lessons learned !! The hard way!!!Chin up!!!

If you use the Wilton plastic dowels, do you request those back with the rest of your equipment? They seem costly, but not all cakes are going to need the same height dowels... at least mine never do?

The mousse filling has been mentioned as maybe being part of the problem, but I disagree, I use mousse fillings all the time with no problem. It's just like indydebi said, it's the doweling system. Any time a tiered cake goes farther than the end of my driveway it's dowelled; but I don't go overboard, for 16 and 18 inch tiers I use 5 dowels, and any smaller 4.

Jibbies

I have only made 2 cakes stacked or tiered. I put dowels down all three layers of both cakes. I think both cakes had respberry filling in them and they didn't move. Good Luck. The cake is absolutely fantastic. I'm sorry this happened.

Thanks everyone, I got some really good advice and I am sure that this will never happen to me again, if I can help it!! Thanks to you all! And for the cake, I just iced the 3 tiers in 3 different colours, and then using BC and a #10 tip, I made the big bubbles, 3 rows and then some to come down the side a bit. then I moved to a #6 tip, and then a #3 tip!! Thats it! It didnt take too long, and it was pretty fun!! By the time I was done the first tier of bubbles, I could go back and push down the peaks so they look nice and round!! Easy peasy!!