Branching Out

I was overjoyed when I discovered, through a chance encounter, that it would be possible to make my carnivorous vegan son a tasty chocolate cake.  He has eaten many of these depression-era chocolate cupcakes and had a dinosaur birthday cake made from the batter as well.  The frosting, made by necessity with Blue Bonnet light margarine was a little soft with an unfortunate tendency to separate, but all in all the cake was a success.
Given my recent discovery of vegan buttermilk, I felt ready to branch out and Grandma Nancy's birthday gave me the perfect occasion.
I was inspired by a friend from residency and her food/fashion/family blog but ultimately ended up settling on a slightly more time consuming but beautiful plan.
I used a vegan vanilla cupcake recipe I found on line (Note: do not consider the addition of the almond extract optional.  It was amazing.) and ended up using a triple recipe, but I made one batch at a time to keep it from going flat while waiting for the layers to be colored and baked.

 (I learned, actually, that our oven is not level, not that anything in our 70+ year old house is.  The resultant fat-on-one-side-skinny-on-another layers required some engineering skill to layer into a level cake.)
The finished product was supposed to be a rainbow but I got distracted in my ROYGBIV and it was just a colorful hodge-podge instead.

The addition of shortening to the buttercream improved the situation significantly though I lacked the diabetic determination necessary to put enough between the layers to really separate the colors.

A thin layer of chocolate on the outside because I firmly believe a birthday cake without chocolate is heresy, some rainbow candles, and voila, birthday magic.